BT Taanit 23a: “…This [story] is why people say: “Either friendship or death.””
“DRGs and d’varim” is going to be the tag and headline I put on posts where you can expect to find references to both FFXIV stuff and real-world spirituality/philosophy stuff (likely specifically Judaism, hence the name).[*]
And this introductory post is to volunteer a little background on why exactly, I want to do that. Not to justify my desire to ramble, but to contextualize my intentions.
I think it’s super cool that humans use every tool at our disposal to engage the universe. I think that myths, epic fantasy, and fiction are a different manifestation of the same curiosities and concerns that we also address through science and philosophy. They’re all part of our way of understanding and relating to the universe and each other. They’re both reflections of our beliefs and priorities.
I know this isn’t like a hot take. I just think it’s neat!
And it just so happens that one of the larger-than-life stories I spend most of my time thinking about is FFXIV. And it just so happens that I’m Jewish and spend a lot of time learning through a Jewish lens. I love both of those things about myself, and I’m excited to have made a place where I can yammer about them here.
Actually, here’s a great example: midrash.
Midrash (analogous to “exposition” or “ investigation”) commonly refers to a practice of rabbinic commentary that dates back to around 400 CE. It’s not unusual for “midrash” to refer to the process by which the commentary is made, the resulting piece of commentary, and sometimes a specific collection of some of those commentaries.
See, Tanakh is terse. It tends to be short on details--about motivation, about chronology, about a lot of things. So in order to engage with the text more deeply, some rabbis began to ask things like…
“So what if, in between these two verses, this other thing had happened and it just didn’t get written down?”
“Hey these two things don’t line up. What could have happened that we don’t know about that WOULD make them line up?”
“Sure he said [X], but did he mean it like this or like that? Or what if he only said it because he was [scared/hurt/etc]?”
“Why would God do that?”
And after asking those questions, the rabbis just started writing down what they thought the answer might be. Thus, midrash was born.
Midrash is amazing. Midrash is a game. Midrash is a dance. It’s the love and frustration of people who have devoted SO MUCH of their lives and thoughts to a text, to understanding it and wanting to get everything they can out of it. It’s a desire to understand so deep that it pushes you to create new things, so you can hold them up like mirrors to see the original from a new angle.
Midrash is rabbinic fanfic.
For 1600+ years, rabbis have been using the same type of text interrogation and play, drawing similar distinctions between canon and headcanon and fanon, as we use with beloved media. That's rad as hell! And I think it’s because beloved media and Torah (and other forms of spirituality/religion/cultural ritual/etc) are really just about being human--about existing as an entity with any amount of autonomy and understanding in the world.
Brief disclaimers:
- You don’t need to be Jewish to engage with these posts! It is ok to not know things but be interested in joining the conversation. Other perspectives and pointing out similarities or contrasts with other traditions is very very welcome!
- I’m delighted to share something that means a lot to me! I engage with this because I think it’s cool as fuck and I wanna share that. This is not proselytizing, this is not intended to be proselytizing, and by and large we take a relatively dim view of proselytizing as a concept.
- I’m not arguing that any of my interpretations (of FFXIV or Jewish texts/etc) are the Right Ones or the only ones or the best ones. Just sharing stuff I think is cool.
- I don't have any particular interest in "exporting" Judaism to FFXIV or anything along those or reversed lines.
- I am not trying to conflate religion and a videogame story, and I mean disrespect to neither
[*] D'varim, which often gets translated as "words" and "things," is the plural of d'var. D'var, in addition to meaning "word" (or "utterance" perhaps) and "thing," is also commonly used to refer to prepared remarks or speeches, including sermons. Divrei Torah are "(my) words (of/about) Torah." (The fifth book of the Torah is called D'varim (Deuteronomy, by Greek naming), because the books and portions of Torah take their name from unique words at the beginning of their passages. D'varim begins with "These are the [things/words] Moses said," making "things/words" the first unique word, making D'varim the title of the book.)
This can't possibly be an actual running series I might do, so please don't let that alliterative title up there mislead you.
...But I do love FFXIV and FFXIV's story. And I am doing Torah study most weeks, which means there's a little weekly story tracker and substack of Jewish history/culture/myth/opinion running in my brain, too. And if I had a nickel for every time this week something happened in FFXIV that made me think of the events and questions of parashat Vayigash I'd have 10 cents, which isn't a lot, but it's funny that it happened twice. All of which is to say that there's already a post in my drafts about one of my Big Fav story themes, which came up both in this week's reading and in FFXIV. I think a lot of larger-than-life fantasy stuff like FFXIV, when done well, winds up touching a lot of the same questions as religion/philosophy/etc (just with a different purpose/from a different perspective/etc)—they're both about finding ways in through the defenses of habit and complication, stripping things down to essentials and finding ways to make them fit into words and images and discrete moments. So I think it makes sense that as I spend a lot of time thinking about those things, I find a lot of common themes.
But that's not what we're here to talk about.
We're here to talk about how utterly rabid it made me to see this (below) after reading about the idea that Joseph's forgiveness of his brothers at the end of the Genesis story—forgiving his brothers for what nearly was fratricide, and may as well have been, as they sold him into slavery and eventual imprisonment—might be not just the first moment of genuine human-to-human forgiveness in the Torah, but among the first such documented moments in surviving history.[1]
Raganfrid: Seven hells... It's her...the Butcher!
Fordola: It's done. Take me back to my cell.
Raganfrid: You are not forgiven.
Raganfrid: Not you. You I will never forgive.
Raganfrid: But I will thank you.
Raganfrid: For standing against a primal and saving us from servitude─you have my thanks.
I don't want to quibble about the definition/connotation of "forgiveness" vs. appeasement vs. anything else, but I do love how powerful it is for Raganfrid to say this. To say that even though he cannot yet give up his hurt and his want for revenge (for what she did to her brothers), he can also hold onto gratitude. For lack of a neater term, he's giving up on the idea of a single, essentialist view of Fordola. Not just the Butcher, but the Butcher who saved my life.
And of course Raganfrid's forgiveness, or anyone else's, isn't necessary for Fordola to have closure and heal and move on and whatever else. It isn't central to Fordola's story or what modicum of resolution she seems to have found in this little arc (although I would argue that it's certainly impactful). The healing that needs to happen for Fordola to move forward isn't in anyone but herself. She needs to figure out whether she is able to change again, whether she has it in her to admit that she was so, so desperately wrong. And she does; in the prison cell when Lyse throws down her ultimatum and Fordola's sword, Fordola has decided that it is more important to her to keep fighting for Ala Mhigo—Ala Mhigo as it is, now, really—than to continue to try to justify her previous actions.
And much like Raganfrid's conclusion, it seems safe to bet that Fordola is also fractured, is also carrying multiple, conflicted narratives about her in her head.
There's a really lovely concept that I came across a few years ago while reading the anthology "Lights in the Forest," edited by R' Paul Citrin, although the concept itself comes from a much older text.[2] It's the idea that you will inevitably (and perhaps often) be in situations where we cannot be absolutist, where we must hold potentially contradictory possibilities—or even acknowledge contradictory truths, as in the case of Fordola—and that in those situations, it describes the sensation like ...mak(ing) yourself a heart of many chambers. Multiple chambers of the same heart, to hold space for these different facets of a person, or different feelings, or whatever it may be.
That's probably enough passing back and forth between Torah and Stormblood for now. Thanks for listening to me geek out about stuff i like!
1 This is from Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (z"l), who I wish to credit as introducing it in his essay on Vayigash in Essays on Ethics but whose claim I otherwise don't really wish to deal with in this post
2 Tosefta, Sotah 7:12