Kaddish

I did not learn anything from my time spent in the graveyard. I stayed there for nigh on two hours — it is marked as ‘dark’, a technical term that I do not know the origin of, meaning that there could be others there around me, but we will never be able to see or interact with each other — alternating between crying and talking, occasionally just sitting in silence beside Juniper’s core dump and looking out over the endless sea of more of such.

Sea is perhaps the wrong word. It implies a surface. The cores continued up above me, vanishing into dimness in a light that came from nowhere, and, although the sim prevented me from leaning over the edge of the platform, I could see down at an angle that the cores continued on below me for some infinite depth.

There was a part of me that was dreadfully tempted to spend the night there, laid out on the platform, sleeping before the remains of someone I am not even sure I would call a friend.

I did not, of course.

No, I returned home to Beth Tikvah and crawled into that nook beneath my desk where I instead curled up on the cushion to try and shut out the world. I have called it before a ‘glorified dog bed’, but it is far more comfortable than that. It has a portion where I may sit and read — cushion along the side wall of the desk, a shelf for books and drinks, a glow bud for gentle light — and yet I may also slouch down to rest, hidden from the world. I can slouch and rest and hide, peering out past the legs of my chair into the little garden patio my small apartment affords me. Some weeks, I sleep there more often than on my bed.

There is where I slept that night.

I spent yesterday volunteering on groundskeeping. I did not wish to spend time at the NUSO, though I imagine they could use the help. I needed old things. I needed quiet things. There were paths to be swept and hedges to be tended.

Let others handle the young and fresh.

Today, however, I am working with Rav in the shul, shuttling in potted plants, vines, and flowers to beautify the space in preparation for Shavuot. The days of sacrificing first fruits at the Temple in Jerusalem are long over, and instead we decorate our small-T temple with these signs of life to bring spring in.

We stand now before a bough of a cottonwood tree that has been ripped from its parent — a tree about halfway down the hill upon which Beth Tikvah sits — by a windy night. Leaves, to all appearances still alive, flutter gaily in the same light breeze that toys with our fur.

“I am unsure if...ah, if it is worth bringing in, but I did find it downed while volunteering yesterday,” I say.

Rav stands, paws akimbo, rumpled, and looks down at the branch. “I see.” She pads toward the thicker end of the branch and hefts it, then lets it drop once more. When she stands upright again, her brow is furrowed. “It is a bit awkward, is it not?”

I nod.

She looks up into the tree itself, at the bare wood shining amidst the bark where the branch tore away. “It really is a shame. I will speak with Serene, see if she has thoughts about it.”

I laugh, unable to help myself. “She will be most proud. Look! Her trees are...ah, they are doing precisely as they did back phys-side.”

Rav grins over at me. “Oh, she will be delighted, I am sure. Oh!” She tilts her head, taken by a new thought. “Did you make your way over to her memorial the other day?”

“I...ah, well, no,” I admit, ears splaying. I had forgotten that I had suggested that I might. “I went instead to the Graveyard.”

Her snout wrinkles in distaste. “I do not like that name.”

I bow my head. “I am sorry, Rav.”

“No, no. It is not on you. If that is the name they have chosen, so be it.” She stuffs her paws in her pockets and lets her gaze drop down to the branch once more. “Why did you go there?”

“I wanted to see one in particular, not...ah, not a monument to all who were lost.”

“Serene’s monument has that, though.”

My ears cant back, an automatic reaction before I can even consider what I might say. “It...does?”

“Yes. It is generative.” She laughs. A single huff of a laugh that sounds more tired than amused. “In fact, I believe it draws the names from the...Graveyard. It was to be a forest, but each of the placeholders for the trees now bears a plaque bearing the name of one of the dead. If you touch them, I believe you even get the same auditory cue.”

I stare at her in silence, then drop my own gaze to the branch between us. It seems silly to me, now, that we might haul an entire branch into the shul. Where would we put it? Would we rest it before the bimah? Would we prop it up against the wall? Pot it and have it stand at the entrace?

“I did not know,” I mumble at last. “Can you go to a specific...tree? Thing?”

She sighs and settles slowly down onto her knees and starts to strip smaller branches off the bough. Guessing at her intent, I kneel to do the same.

“That much I do not know, actually. If you were after the memorialization of one person in particular, then perhaps you are right to seek out the Graveyard. That is what they are for, after all.”

“I was, yes. I wanted...ah, I wanted to see Juniper’s lost up-tree’s core.”

She pauses in her work and lifts her gaze to me, a strange smile on her face. “You? Juniper?”

“I...ah, well,” I stammer, worrying a particularly flexible branch loose from its base. “May I send you my notes from the interview? Perhaps...mm, perhaps that will help me explain.”

“Of course. While I read, we can bring these into the building and twine them with the vines. Maybe that will work.”

I nod. It is the work of a moment to pluck that particular interview transcript from the running stack that I have, and place it into a file in the perisystem, access shared with my down-tree. After letting her know the address, we both fall to silence. The bough is quickly stripped of its remaining branches, and we make our way back to the building.

The synagogue itself is a broad, low-slung structure that draws its majesty not from its architecture, but from its position. It takes the shape of a dumbell, with the sanctuary taking up one end and the social hall the other, connected by a breezeway that guards a small courtyard garden that contains the summit stone for the hill upon which it is built. The sanctuary rests on the flatter top of the hill, opening out onto the field where we hold our outdoor events, while the social hall, glass-walled, projects out over the slope itself, showing the small town that makes up the rest of the sim. There are a few apartments underneath the social hall, dug partly into the hill itself, including both Rav’s and that of Rabbi Katz, our cantor.

We have decorated the social hall primarily with potted plants and flower arrangements — we have a member, an oneirotect of some skill, who is quite obsessed with dahlias — but the bimah and aron kodesh we have draped with long strands of pothos-like Pull-Me vines, shaggy green lines that soften all the angles carved into the wood of both platform and Torah ark.

While Rav reads in her head, we weave the leafy branches of cottonwood into the the vines. True to their name, when we pull on a leaf, the stem elongates into a new strand of vine, sprouting its own leaves along the way. We tuck the branches in and arrange the leaves to cover up most of the silvery bark. That the leaves are a brighter green than that of the Pull-Me leads to a pleasant accentuation.

I can tell when she finishes catching up on the interview, as she quits fiddling with greenery and instead pads over to touch me on the elbow, then holding wide her arms to welcome me into an embrace.

I accept gratefully.

“I see now,” she whispers.

I tighten my hug around her before slipping away again, unwilling to let the the conversation stall based on this moment of emotion, however touching.

“As I was at the Graveyard and...ah, and as I was working yesterday, I recalled something that you said some months back,” I say, “which is that faith is not here to give me easy answers to hard questions, but to provide a framework for dealing with the existence of hard questions.”

Rav catches my elbow before I slip away completely and guides me gently over to the chairs in front of the bimah. I still hold a few of the branches, but this I figure is alright, it will give me something to fidget with.

“I know that frameworks are generally a thing that help you out, yes,” she says. “But come, tell me what was on your mind.”

Indeed, I find myself immediately taking up one of the branches and turning it about and about in my fingers. “Well...ah, I suppose that I was thinking about rather a lot.”

“I am not surprised by this.”

I smirk down to the branch in my paws. “Yes, yes. Well, I was thinking at first how I was feeling quite angry, yes? How I was feeling angry with HaShem for so long, yes? I was thinking about that joke, of the two Jews telling Holocaust jokes, and–”

Rav tilts her head. “Which?”

“There are a few, I suppose,” I say with a weak laugh. “Two concentration camp survivors are...ah, are telling each other dark jokes about the Shoah when God happens past and scolds them, saying, “How dare you make light of this tragedy! How dare you joke!” And the two reply, “Ah, how could you possibly understand? You were not there.””

She snorts. “I heard it as a Jew dying and going to Heaven, telling HaShem a Holocaust joke and, when They did not laugh, the Jew said “I suppose you had to have been there to understand.””

“It is a whole genre of humor, yes? A whole framework. I was thinking of things such as this, of this type of anger, and I was...ah, I suppose I was stuck wondering why it was that Juniper — who I believe is quite active with the temple and conscientious with their faith — was seemingly not feeling the same. Was it something about my approach that was wrong? Or theirs? And...ah, and I think that I eventually came down on the side of us simply having different frameworks.”

She listens thoughtfully, her paws folded in her lap and her gaze tracing along the lines of green throughout the sanctuary.

“We all must, I think,” she says, looking back to me with a faint smile. “Somehow, even the two of us, despite having at one point been the same person, view the world through rather different frameworks.”

I bow my head in acknowledgement.

“I think you are not wrong, here,” she continues. “Juniper views the world through a lens that you simply do not have. You do not see the same things, or do not see the same things in the same way. They view the attack through the lens of how the world has changed, whereas you, I think, view it as an act that was perpetrated against us.”

“This is...ah, well, I do not think that you are wrong, but this is a thing that I struggle with. It is in the very name, is it not? Attack?”

“Of course, and I do not think that they discount that. Had you pressed them on the issue, I think they might have indeed had much to say about the subject of the Century Attack as an attack. However, they are also approaching all of life from a different viewpoint. Their interests are still very much focused on the wonder of the System. They are quite young, after all.”

I frown. “I was thinking of that, as well, yes. We are tricentennarians, they are still a new upload, comparatively.”

“Indeed. They were born after Launch. Decades after! They were born after the arrival of the Artemisians. They have never known a world not just without the System, but without Castor and Pollux, our two sibling Systems now well on their way out of the Heliosphere. They have never known a world where first contact has not been made.

“We, though,” she continues, gesturing to me and herself, “remember a world when all we had was immersive VR. No Ansible. No uploading. No forking or oneirotecture or sim artistry. We were there when they locked our sensoria into consensus and we experienced the same world together. We knew the pain of loss when Lagrange overcorrected and deleted the first forked identity and the one from whom they forked. We sent some of the first sensorium messages. We were there for Secession, and we sent instances along with the Launch project two hundred years later. That we struggle to comprehend each other’s viewpoint on the matter of the Attack is not surprising, when one considers just what it means to be a tricentennarian.”

As Rav speaks, I toy further with the knobbly branch in my paws, tracing my dull claws along the bulges and wrinkles in the bark.

I ask at last, “Is this why you assigned me this project, then? So that...ah, so that I would better understand this?”

She smiles fondly to me, if also a little sadly, and rests a paw on my knee. “No, my dear. I would not presume to instruct you thus. We are equals.”

I open my mouth to speak, but she laughs, not unkindly, and shakes her head.

“I know, I know. I am also your rabbi. In this we are equals, though, my dear.” She leans over to kiss me softly on the cheek. “No, I assigned you this project for reasons that I am honestly not quite sure of, myself. It came to me as we sat together on New Year’s Eve, and I realized just how well you were doing with organizing Yom HaShichzur, and how much it seemed to help us. You and me.”

I lift my gaze from the stick in my paws to peer curiously at her. “You gave me this project because of us?” I could feel uncharitable interpretations bubbling up within me. You gave me something to keep me busy? You gave me work to do so I would leave you alone? You gave me a task to keep us from arguing? Instead of levying accusations, however, I tamp those thoughts down and ask. “Can...ah, can you explain? I am not sure I understand.”

“I can try. As I said, I do not wholly understand, myself. Some of it was intuition, perhaps, whether borne of our similarities or just our time together.” She plucks one of the remaining sticks from the small pile on my lap and uncharacteristically fidgets in a way similar to myself. “The year after we came back was...rough. It was very rough, at points. You seemed like you were hurting, and also like you were in need of something, but I never could figure out what exactly that something was.”

I watch the way she turns the stick over and over in her paws, mirroring what I have been doing throughout this conversation. Mirroring, or perhaps it is a thing that is simply very us. On the days when I have spent time with Slow Hours and her stanza, I have heard her down-tree, A Finger Pointing, playfully accuse her various up-trees you had to have gotten it from somewhere when they exhibit some particular bit of wit. Perhaps this thing that I do is merely an echo of some grander commonality.

I do not know.

This fidgeting, these words...

“I see,” I say at last, and I marvel that the accusations that came so quickly to mind have melted away. “Thank you, my dear. For explaining, and for...ah, for thinking of me.”

She smiles gratefully to me, and I realize that she must have been worried to tell me. I file this fact away as she pushes herself to her feet. “Of course, my dear. Come. Let us get the rest of these woven in, and then I think we may well be done. Perhaps we can invite Serene over to crow over her cottonwoods being just as fragile as we remember.”

I nod and follow with the last handful of sticks, helping to weave them in so that their leaves show as bright green jewels amid the dark green of the vines.

I am starting to suspect that there is a truth that lies somewhere between my uncharitable accusations and Rav's kind words. I read it in her relief, just as I read it in myself. I am starting to suspect that she is right, that I needed something to do to keep myself going, because, as I suspect of myself, I tend to get quite bitchy without. Without Yom HaShichzur, I was treating Rav quite poorly, and so perhaps coming up with a task for me to start on as soon as my work with the holiday was over was a protective action on her part.

I do also trust her, though, when she says that she is not wholly sure, that she is still thinking about just why she came up with this for me. Sometimes, an idea will occur to one as though from outside oneself or any known inspiration, and one can either act on it or not. I trust that she was acting on an intuition, just as I trust that she loves me even still, even when I risk being a bit bitchy at her.

Both of these things are true: Rav gave me this thing to do to get me to stop being such a bitch, and she has my best interest at heart. The latter rather takes the sting out of the former, does it not?