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