Kaddish

I took a few weeks off from the interviewing and instead focused on introspection, reading, and writing. Much of that writing became quite dry and academic and may eventually be pulled into a paper of sorts, but it was originally destined for this journal.

Journal?

Memoir?

I wonder at times what it is that I am writing here. I said early on that I was not sure that other eyes would see this work, but I know also that I said that I would not elide my stammer for whoever might read this, that it is too important to me that this be represented (though I have had to find a way to represent it that feels accurate enough).

If I am writing a journal, then why is it that I worry about the eyes of others?

If I am writing a memoir, then why is it not a guided retelling of my life?

My goals with this work are confused, and I suppose that this must make sense, as everything is confused. My goals are confused because I am confused.

My feelings on this life and my relationship to it are in disarray, and I suppose that this must make sense, as everything is in disarray. My feelings are in disarray because I am lost in it all.

I started writing it as a means of piecing together my thoughts on how I was feeling after the first Yom HaShichzur celebration, my feelings over this thing that Rav asked of me.

From there, I kept writing it because the first interview I conducted — that with my friend, Joseph — led to a series of memories that tripped me up into overflow.

Beyond that? I do not know why.

Perhaps the habit was formed. Perhaps it is a matter of momentum.

I wonder, though, if it is not perhaps part of processing. I wonder if there is something that I am still trying to sort out, if there is something that I still need to get off my chest. Am I still struggling for some sort of release that I hope I may find in the act of writing? Am I hoping that there will be catharsis to be found?

I spoke today of this with Hasher. We spoke of many things, and, yes, I interviewed them, but the reason that I sought them out in particular was to look for someone who might offer me a sort of comfort through this process. Not, I think, that I wanted them to actively comfort me with this, mind. There are just some people who, when you speak with them, exude comfort, yes? And in Hasher's case, I have long associated them, ever since that first day in The Bean Cycle, with a comfort and stability of sorts. It is, I think, nothing beyond the fact that they were an attentive listener when a stranger was struggling before them, but that association has led to a fond friendship between us.

Beyond this, however they have proven helpful by not simply being another person I know through Beth Tikvah or Beth Tefillah. Even Joseph, after all, I met through our correspondence around attending a service.

It is not that I in any way resent how much of my life surrounds this calling and these people!

It is just perhaps also telling that Hasher is one of the few friends that I have who is not either another coreligionist — or really even religious at all — or a cocladist. I built up a life for myself, and it is a lovely life, but it is lived narrowly.

And so we met, sitting out on the quad at the university, the one just across the street from The Bean Cycle.

On that first visit to the café I had not quite pieced together that I had already spent months and years in this sim. It was just a coffee shop picked at random from Infinite Café because of the cascade of bicycles down the wall outside. It was not until a few days after staying there that I realized why the sight outside the windows kept catching my attention: I received one of my masters degrees at the university here, though the liberal arts buildings were clear on the other side of the campus.

Ah well. I am quite old, now, and so perhaps it is not surprising that synchronicity crop up quite so often throughout my life.

I opened my conversation with Hasher with this fact, and they laughed easily, sitting up so that they could sign as they spoke. “I know you've mentioned that to me before today, but I hadn't really considered it as a form of synchronicity.”

We had never stopped since that first day signing as we spoke to one another. There were days when I could not speak and they were deaf in one ear, and so it made sense on a practical level, but it was also something that defined our friendship. It was integral to us.

I shrugged from where I knelt beside them. “It is...ah, well, I suppose it is on my mind.”

“Synchronicity?”

“Time,” I explained. “Time and just how old I am, yes?”

“You're a tricentenarian, right?”

I nodded. “Three hundred fif– er...three hundred sixteen.”

“Old lady.”

“Young whippersnapper.”

They snorted. “You don't look that old, though I'm no great judge of skunks.”

“Every skunk is...ah, is different,” I said, relishing the sign for my chosen species: the paw in a 'K' shape, run up over the head to denote a stripe — and yet here I actually had such a stripe. It has always felt like a validation of a portion of my identity. “But I have changed little since 2117 in any grand ways, yes? I am...ah, well, I have tuned my appearance, to be sure, but I still look to be in my thirties, I imagine.”

“Most of your clade does, yeah. At least, the four or five I've met.” They furrowed their brow in thought. “You, Slow Hours, If I Dream, From Whence...maybe some others and I didn't realize it.”

“There are...ah, there are a lot of us, but the System is wide, yes? I would be surprised if, out of the trillions here, you ran into us with any frequency but through connections, yes?”

They shrugged. “We were just talking about synchronicity. Who knows? Maybe someone's dropped by and neither of us noticed it. Even just with the four of you I know I've met, there's three different species. You and From Whence are the same species, but look plenty different. You're more...animalistic, I guess.”

“That is...ah, rather, we have approached this part of our identity quite differently, yes? She seeks to exude friendliness and comfort, and this means compromising on...ah, on some aspects of–”

”'Compromising'?”

I lowered my snout, chastened. “Yes, you are right,” I signed, slipping out of speaking at the same time. If there is comfort for me in not speaking aloud, then I was pleased at the opportunity to shield sheepishness in silence. “I will say instead that I have adopted these aspects of non-human identity, while she has adopted a sort of deliberate approachability with her appearance. I demand my whole name at every turn and have set aside the title of rabbi, while she lets people call her 'Rav' because it suggests pastoral caring and the knowledge to offer advice.”

“You have thought a lot about this, haven't you?” they replied, also only signing.

“I have had a long time to do so. I do not think we have ever gone more than a week or so without seeing each other.”

“You still love her.”

“Never stopped.” I grinned wide as I signed, and they grinned right back.

“I know you're supposed to be interviewing me, but you've gotten me thinking about all of these differences. Here I am looking basically like I did the day I uploaded, and you are skunk people and panther people and human people and who knows what else.”

I smirked and signed, “If you ask ten furries why they have shaped themselves in the ways that they have, you will get a hundred different answers.”

“Does that mean you'll give me ten if I ask 'why skunk'?”

I looked down at the grass and considered what possible answers I might give, trying to decide if they did indeed tally up to ten. I decided that I was not sure, and forced my gaze back up to them. The grass was cool and inviting. I wanted to run my paws through it. I wanted to rub the leaves and stalks together between my pawpads. I wanted to feel it prickle up through my fur.

I needed my paws, however.

“At least eight,” I said. “Everything from “because I like them” all the way up to some high-minded thoughts on the theological implications of choosing one's form.”

They laughed, earnest, and replied, “I'll have to trust you on that one. Wouldn't know the first thing about theology.”

“Never learn,” I signed with a dramatic groan. “It will only bring you trouble.”

It was this that my mind lingers on now. I found none of their answers to the interview surprising. I found their conversation precisely as grounding as I had suspected. I came away from our talk feeling lighter, freer. I was more myself, perhaps.

I also came away, however, with this little bit of inconsequential conversation that nevertheless sticks in my craw.

I have thought and written so often of late about HaShem and the role that They play within my life — within our lives — within the System — and particularly in regards to the tragedy that befell us. Where, I have asked time and again, was Their staying hand?

There are days when this anger, this fury nips constantly at my heels, and days like today where it is less. I spent time with a friend. It is distant from me now, this feeling, and instead of feeling it quite so intensely, I am able to hold it at a distance and regard it with curiosity. How intriguing that I feel this way! How intriguing an idea, that the Eternal reach in and scoop from the hearts of many such hatred.

Having this room, then, permits me also other perennial wonderings.

I am this thing. I am this me.

I am a skunk. I have fashioned myself into a very particular being. I have a hand in my own creation, and I have taken that up with joy, for I have heard it said at times that They created wheat but not bread and grapes but not wine, and it is by our hands that we fashion and perfect, too. We may bless the bread baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, melech ha'olam hamotzi lechem min ha'aretz, we praise HaShem for bringing bread from the earth, and yet still we bake. We mix and knead and shape, and the yeast proofs and the heat transforms and these are processes that we thus shepherd.

I am a woman, and I would say that I am a woman the long way around. There was even a time a little over a century ago that I fashioned myself into a man — maintaining, of course, my species — and from this point, laborious, I made myself, stepwise and wandering, back into femininity. I made myself into What Right Have I, shaped as perhaps our father was, and then explored unknown lays of unknown lands, walking paths of hormones and surgery — yes, even here sys-side! — until I found home. Not merely “where I had been before” but home. It was an exercise in change and identity that I do this thing, that I become so masculine and then wind up transitioning thus. That I wound up so close to where I had started was in many ways heartening. It proved to me and to many others within the clade that the us that we had formed ourselves into was true and earnest and correct. It was as us as we could be.

And yet I am not just a woman, for is that not part of what we have learned time and again over the years? That we are queer women specifically? That is the joy we found in our body after our top surgery in our twenties, after all. We are queer to the last, whether or not we remain also women.

And through it all, I am also b'tzelem Elohim. Along every step of the way I have remained What Right Have I, who was made in the image of God.

Oh, of course, the debates have ever raged, and so many, even myself at times, would say that of course this does not mean that HaShem is a skunk, that They are not a queer woman specifically. It is, as so many and even at times myself would say, a matter of capacity. We have the capacity for holiness, for godliness. We have the capacity to know good and evil and everything in between.

But ask me now and I would say that it must also be true that this directionality can be flipped, that HaShem also has the capacity to be a skunk, a queer woman. It must also be true that They — Endless, Infinite, with the capacity to become and encompass all — have the capacity to become me, to encompass all that is me.

Ah, but I am more than just these things, am I not?

I am twitchy and ticcy. I am anxious and jittery. I am bound by my compulsions and wrapped — joyously! — in my identity of being, as I have so fondly called myself, catastrophically autistic.

I am What Right Have I, who cannot help but squeak or chirp or beep at times, the noises forced from her as a compulsion. I am What Right Have I, who startles at touch and at sound and shies away from her fears. I am What Right Have I, who opened her arms to neurodivergence, welcomed it in, and buried herself in the sheer, unmitigated joy of it all.

HaShem must then also have within them — Endless! Infinite — the capacity to yelp and jerk Their head to the side with a tic, to hide beneath Their desk and cry when afraid, to dissolve Themself into hyperfixation.

I am a coward, and thus within HaShem is the capacity for cowardice.

I am weeping. I really, truly know, deep in my heart, that within HaShem is the ability to weep.

I am walking slow circles around fury, but...ah! We already know that They have within Them the capability to be furious.

Above all, though, I am vulnerable, and perhaps it would do me well to remember that They, too, are vulnerable. We are made in Their image, and so They must be capable of expressing, bearing, being all that is us, including every last lick of vulnerability.

After all, it was not Job or his friends who learned in the book. None of them changed except perhaps in the most fairytale storybook of ways. Job remained steadfast. His friends remained faithful only on the most surface of levels.

No, it is The Divine who learns, who changes and grows. Job confronts Them with an interrogation, and all They can do is exclaim: how strange is this world! You cannot possibly understand. I have made for you a thing beyond ken, perhaps even Mine. You have offered your faith, and I accept this, but My goodness, what a strange world we have found ourselves in.

Job leaves this with his new family, with his restored wealth — and notably without his restored health — and continues on, maintaining his inherited faith in HaShem regardless of reward or punishment.

The Divine comes away marveling at man. Ah...I wander...

Forgive me, O Divine. I have been so mad with fever. Forgive me.

Have I hurt You? Eternal, forgive me.

I had perhaps indeed forgotten that You, too, are vulnerable.

But– ah! Yours was the first mistake: creating me in Your own image.

Tender.

Fallible.

Ah...