Kaddish

It all flows back...

This is a nothing sentence from a book that was otherwise quite forgettable. It is one that I listened to as an audiobook rather than reading, however, and for some reason, the narrator, an elderly gentleman, stated this line with such sagacity and yet such exhaustion that it has stuck to this day in my head. It all flows back.

I have tried saying this out loud to myself thousands of times over the years. I cannot ever get it to sound quite right. It always sounds in my voice like the very nothing sentence that I accuse it of being. It all flows back.

I cannot evoke the feeling that I get when I remember that weary recitation, when I say the words. I cannot evoke the sure knowledge that there is a cyclical nature to our world, or the awe that one feels upon realizing this fact, or the exhaustion that one feels when confronted with yet another rhyme in our endless lives. I cannot evoke that feeling of standing beside a sage, hearing them speak about the little nothings of the day, of a life, and knowing that even their throw-away comments bear more knowledge than I will ever have.

For a while, I tried to embody this feeling. I tried to live it out, if I could not speak it. I have eschewed as I have said the title ‘rabbi’ except in ceremonial contexts, but for some time now, I have called myself What Right Have I, Talmidat Chakhamim. My semicha aside, I consider myself more than anything a student of sages. I am the one who sits at their feet and learns from them.

And yes, I may condense their teaching into words that I might teach others. I still have my job, my role in life as the scholar.

But that is all I feel myself to be. A scholar. A perpetual student. Learned, yes, but learning still.

It all flows back, those words in that voice, are the words of a sage. Perhaps when I can, through four words, sing the rhymes of our lives into being with all of the honor and awe that they deserve and the weariness that they engender, then I will finally be a sage.

Until then, this has become a saying of mine — a private one, given the above complaint, never really one I say out loud — that crops up whenever I notice these rhymes, or see the spirals that time weaves in our lives.

These are the words that played in my head whenever I changed my body. For once, I looked rather a lot more like Rav From Whence. Of course I did, I mean. I had those larger eyes, and those more flexible lips and stronger cheeks, the softer, more anthropomorphized expressions. I had the fur that was softer, silkier. I had the tail that was bushy and thick — a tail that you could hug! — rather than the coarse, wispy fur that now my tail has. Once, I formed myself into a masculine skunk, changing my appearance, my voice, my pronouns. Once, I transitioned back to a feminine form, not too far off from where I started. Once, I formed myself into a non-anthropomorphic skunk, walking on all fours and stomping my front paws as a warning, tail hiked high. And now, I am this. Now, I am me as I am.

And with each of these changes, I noticed the rhythm of change. I noticed how I would say the same words, that HaShem made wheat but not bread, grapes but not wine, that I have a hand in my own creation. I noticed the ways in which others would show their curiosity or hesitancy or frustration or excitement. I noticed the way the world felt different.

It all flows back, I would think, and I would catch a glimpse of this sagacious truth. Just a glimpse.

They are the words that play in my head when I fall into overflow, and when I claw my way back out of it. They are the words that play when I roll steadily through the cycle of the year with each festival and fast. They are the words of change.

They are also the words of the world, and of our society writ large.

They are the words that I think to myself when I see how society rhymes over time, or the way we bring things back like a refrain.

I say these words to myself when I notice the way that we yearn for what was. Chadeish yameinu kekedem, we tell ourselves. Renew our days as of old.

And so, it all flows back, I say to myself, as I step to one of my favorite recreations of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

I have found perhaps three dozen such sims in my time here, sys-side. Three dozen attempts to recreate a building, a complex, a town. Three dozen hearkenings back.

Most of these sims also include an attempt to bring back the society that must have surrounded the temple. Period clothing, period technology, priests and sacrifices. Nearly half of them contain only the Temple Mount.

I find that, in all but two cases, these sims come off to me as something akin to the renaissance festivals we attended back phys-side, back before uploading. They are caricatures of a time. They are estimations of a life meant to be consumed in two or three hour chunks. At most, some may go to one three times a year. Perhaps one might enjoy that experience enough to pretend that they are the destination for the Shalosh Regalim.

But they are theme parks. They are attractions.

You can go to these sims, walk around Jerusalem, wear your period-accurate costumes — six require such and two require that you have a human form — eat period-accurate food, spend period-accurate money. All allow visiting the Temple, but thirteen restrict women to the women’s gallery. Twenty-three allow visitors to see the Holy of Holies, and eleven allow visitors to enter it, though only one allows them to do so at all times rather than during scheduled tours.

All but three of these sims are run by Christian or Messianic groups and focus on the temple specifically around the time of Jesus. Eight include recreations of the Passion. One allows, on special request and only during certain times of the year, the opportunity to be crucified yourself. One sim is run by a Messianic group that hides their true nature in an attempt to convert Jewish visitors (though I know of none who have thus converted). Shai discovered this almost on accident. Usually, such groups are quite open about their focus on Jesus, but in this case, they hid well, and it was only due to him seeing the name of God written in Phoenician paleo-Hebrew — which has become something of a shibboleth — on a placard which spurred him to investigate the sim’s management.

And so this leaves three.

Three Second Temple sims out of three dozen that are run by Jewish groups.

Doubtless there are more. Doubtless other groups have come up with the idea of creating a sim based on this one building and this one time in our history. It is such a well-documented building! The entirety of the Mishnah Middot is there for anyone to read! Your plans are ready-made. Doubtless there are more, but it has been some time since I have gone looking, and certainly not after the Century Attack.

One sim, with half of its ownership taken out by the attack, destroyed the Temple much as the Romans did, and then abandoned it. It is now completely unmoderated, but with very restrictive ACLs.

The second of these three sims is one of the ones which restricts both appearance and access to women. I have been, but only twice, and have no desire to go back. I can fork into a human shape easily enough. It is not strictly comfortable, but it is fine. I am also fine with the idea that women be restricted as they were in those days of old within these settings. I spent my time in the SCA.

What I do not enjoy, however, is the people who are attracted to these ideals. Oh, the owners of the sim are fine, just as are many of those who worked at the renaissance festivals I went to back phys-side. They are perhaps not the type of person that I will spend a great deal of time around, but they are nice. They are respectful. They are good people.

It is the people who fixate on this, instead, that I am loath to be around. The people who choose to live in this sim. The people who visit every day or every week. I do not like their eyes on me. I do not wish to be seen by them. Not as a human. Not as a woman.

And thus we come to the final sim.

This is the second temple as it appeared in about 15 BCE. It is the temple built under the Persians, dedicated by the Maccabees, and expanded by Herod I. The ethos of the sim is set by the schedule. During many of the weekdays in the summer and winter, it takes the form of an historic site, complete with tours, a staff of scholars researching and teaching, and a steady stream of visitors. On Shabbat, a unique style of service is held, blending aspects of historical rites with contemporary Reform and New Reform services.

However, during the spring and autumn, the sim leans harder into historic recreation. Not just the quotidian life of the previously mentioned sim, but something far more personable. It is not the type of place where thousands of people show up for a day, dress the part, and then go home with a set of memories.

Instead, a long-running plot has been playing out, run three months at a time. It goes beyond reenactment and into writing historical fiction. Interpersonal dynamics evolve over the months and years and decades. People fall in love. People die. The stories long ago veered away from a strict recreation and now it is our own story.

I have spent decades here, living out various lives. Sometimes, it will be engrossing, and I will live in the sim for these three month spans in spring and autumn. Sometimes, I will drift away, as I did two decades before the Century Attack.

I do not know what compels me to return today.

It is Shavuot, and as such, I have baked and brought with me Shtei Halechem, the two loaves to be offered as the first fruits of the season — I and so many others, for Shavuot is one of the pilgrimage festivals, and many, many people are here today. Some bear literal fruit, as well, small baskets of apricots and strawberries and cherries, or perhaps zucchini and cucumbers. There is a certain type of Jew who attends these festival days in all earnestness, here at a sim representing the Second Temple.

I am not normally such a Jew.

The Temple was destroyed. The era of the Temple is over. The Temple is the Torah, the Synagogue, the Jewish home. We are no longer a faith centered around a place, a building, a world of priests and sacrifices.

We — so many Jews — know this. We know this and we accept this and we love this. We cherish that which we have become. We praise the sages, the rabbis of old. We learn and we teach and we move within the world now. This world. This now.

When I am here — when so many other Jews are here — we are here to reenact a story. A tale. We know that the time of the Temple has passed, and we cherish what was while also living in what is.

Today, though, on Shavuot and on the other Shalosh Regalim, tickets are required — at least, by those who are not a part of the story, thus my lucky presence — and the city streets are as filled with pilgrims as the city must once have been. The norms are relaxed in some respects; speaking in languages other than Aramaic and Hebrew, such as the mix of English, Russian, and Chinese that is the lingua franca of the System — an act we call “crocodiling” for obscure reasons — is allowed. And yet they are in many ways more strict: the dress code and code of conduct are enforced more strongly, and many otherwise private and secluded spaces are locked to keep the focus on the festival. There will be further relaxation down the line. Shavuot is the event that opens the sim to the public, just as Shemini Atzeret is the day that closes it once more.

Today, I wind my way through the streets of the lower city with the vague goal of making my way up to the Temple.

The press...the press of bodies is so much that I stop every few doorways and close my eyes, doing my best to breathe and look as though I belong. I do belong. This is my erstwhile home, and, as I feel its draw, I know that it will be my home again at some point in the future.

The noise is so loud that I tune down my hearing to about a quarter of normal. Exclamations. Singing. The rustle and stamp of feet on the dusty streets. They all huddle instead in the back of my mind rather than clouding out all of my thoughts. Those thoughts are scared little creatures, easily startled. Little, burrowing things that will hide away sooner than deal with a loud noise; field mice that would sooner disappear around a bend in their tunnelled abodes than risk that noise meaning danger.

About halfway along the path from the gate to the city and the Temple itself, a hand touches my elbow, skin weathered and knuckles knurled, and a face both sly and friendly looks up into my own.

“Ah...Havivah?”

The woman grins, cants her head to the side, gesturing back, and I realize that I have unknowingly stopped in her doorway.

Grateful for the chance to escape from the press and the noise, I slip in past her and she shuts the door solidly behind her, sliding home a simple yet effective latch. With the sim locked down, only those who live here or are given permission can open it, but there is some greater sense of security to be had in the act of latching a door.

“What Right Have I! Baruch HaShem, I’m glad to see you.” She speaks in the same mix of Aramaic, Hebrew, and syslingua that much of our out-of-character chatter takes place in, but I have decided that I will keep this record consistent. Evocation, rather than imitation. Imagine for me if you must an old Ashkenazi woman of the type who slips more readily into Yiddish than anything. Let not her Mizrahi appearance — all olive skin and thick, curly black hair — fool you, she is a Yiddishe bubbe at heart, and reminds me most of my grandmother Sarah, despite the similarity in looks to my other grandmother Rahel. “How’re you? How’ve you been? Come, you must tell me everything. Tea? You look parched.”

I slowly ratchet up my hearing to about halfway, enough to hear her without the noise of the crowd outside overwhelming my hearing. “As I am you!” I reply, a phrase not nearly so awkward in our easy chatter. “Yes please to the tea. I have...ah, I have been well enough. Not great, but well enough. What of you? You are well, I pray?”

Havivah gives a short, sharp bark of a laugh as she digs briefly in a chest and comes up with a bundle of mint. “That’s not telling me everything! You want I should just continue on blithely? What Right Have I, back in our neck of the woods for the first time in years, having fundamentally changed our holidays — and for the better I might add! — and now we must get by on ‘not great, but well enough’! Vey Gott! A pittance!” She cackles, brandishing the mint at me like a conductor might a baton, as though to lead me into speaking. “Now, Havivah will tell you all sorts, to be sure, but you must tell her everything, first, mayn skunkniu.”

It is all very endearing, and I find I cannot but giggle. I set aside the carefully wrapped loaves of bread and settle down onto one of the low stools at the lone table in the room. “Very well, very well,” I say. “I will say again that I have been not great, but well enough, and...ah, and expand on that. I am pleased with how Yom HaShichzur turned out, yes? And I am pleased with the fact that life has continued on. I have been reading still, and writing. Rav From Whence has tasked me with...ah, I suppose it is with a writing project, but it is also perhaps a bit more than that. Full of interviews and conversations, and the revelations that go with those. A social project, yes?”

“Yes, I see,” she says, pouring water from a jug into a pot and hanging that over the cooking fire kindled in the hearth. “You’re here for that? For your social project?”

“Well, I came originally for the service,” I say, nodding over to the bread.

“Ay! And here I’ve gone and stolen you away!”

I laugh, waving both my paws disarmingly. “No, no. I do not...ah, I do not feel a pressing need. I will admit, I do not actually know what drove me to take part this year. A whim, perhaps. I am not married to the idea of actually going to the Temple today, not after being up most of the night, reading.”

“This–” she says as she glances slyly over her shoulder at me, “–this is why I know that you’re not doing so bad. It’s like dogs with cold noses: you know that your skunk is healthy if she stays up all the night, nose in a book.”

The statement catches me so off-guard that I am caught once more in a gigglefit, Havivah chortling smugly to herself as she breaks the dry stems of mint and pushes the whole bundle under the water in the kettle, using her fingers while the water is still cool enough to do so.

“Very well, you say you’re not fussed, you’re not fussed. You still want, you just tell Havivah, and go run off to the Temple.”

Still smiling, I shake my head. “No, I really am fine. This...ah, this is what I needed, I think, more than getting trampled on my way to dedicate some bread. It feels...ah, well, it feels a little silly, now, in retrospect.”

“How like Jews we are! Chadesh yameinu k’kedem, we say, and we build ourselves a brand new Temple, just like the old, and then we go off and have all these big feelings about it. We go fuss about doikayt and golah, and then we cry ‘vey!’ and come running back to places like this.”

“This is...ah, this is much of what I was thinking while trying to make my way up the road, yes.”

Sitting by the edge of the hearth, she slouches over to the side, propping herself up on a hand. “No doubt plenty of big thoughts bouncing around in that brain of yours. You had grandparents from Israel, didn’t you?”

I nod. “Savta and Sabba Hadje made yerida and landed in Pittsburgh. They met there, despite leaving Israel within days of each other.”

“Second Diaspora types?”

“Oh, yes,” I say with a laugh. I am falling back into the rhythm of conversation with her with surprising ease. Everything is so much less purpose-driven, and so much more meaning shades the tonality of our words. “They met at...ah, at a meetup or similar, yes? Some mixer for lonely Jews who had escaped the promised land.”

She levels an appraising gaze at me, as though sizing me up against some new estimation she has of me. “This why you and yours got all wrapped up in that Twelve Hours’ War kerfuffle?”

I have to sit back in my seat and think about this. I stare down at my paws folded in my lap.

Havivah seems content to let me stew, instead sitting up and peering in the pot as it hangs over the fire. The water is only just starting to steam.

Late in the 22nd century, five or six decades after we uploaded, a countercultural movement, the New Zion Movement, began to grow in influence in more conservative strains of Judaism — no doubt in part due to some of the changes brought about by the existence of the System. This snowballed quickly and some militant groups left in the area began to amass weapons and other wartime materiel. After finding political success during the 2180s, the genocide that in part defined the preceding century returned in grand fashion. The Western Fed declared an unequivocal intent to stop the genocide by force if necessary, and the S-R Bloc found themselves treaty-bound to protect Israel, which led to a brief military action.

Fearing the potential for a third World War, a group sys-side, lead by Rav, True Name, and a few others, organized a conference between the three parties — the Western Fed, The S-R Bloc, and Israel — which wound up drawing the military action that came to be known as the Twelve Hours’ War to a close. This sys-side group acted as mediators, despite the Articles of Secession indicating that they would not interfere politically with nations phys-side.

It worked, though.

It worked, and from that point on, using the System as political mediator became common. It was part of the basis of the role that True Name played in sys-side politics, and that time spent together in turn formed part of the basis of Rav’s relationship with her.

I send Rav a gentle sensorium ping, no more than the mental equivalent of an enquiring tap on the shoulder.

“Yes? Is all well, my dear?” she replies in an audio-only duplex.

“Yes, quite well,” I subvocalize my response. “I am speaking with Havivah and...ah, and she asked me a curious question: do you think that...ah, that Savta and Sabba Hadje being part of the Second Diaspora played a role in you and True Name working on the Israeli Crisis?”

The answer comes quite quickly: “Oh, absolutely. I do not know how much True Name would have agreed, but I certainly think so.”

“Really? How so?”

“Well, imagine,” she says after a moment, a chuckle in her voice. “Rahel Yaffe and Shai Hadje leave Israel in disgust in the mid-2000s, just as the state is falling apart. They meet, find a delightful community on the East Coast, really lean into yor’dim as an identity, and then a century later, their grand-daughter, someone who has already been in politics, witnesses a bunch of people who look back on the attrocities of the 21st century and think, ‘that was a good idea; what if we did that but more?’” At this, she really does laugh, adding, “I was fucking pissed, my dear.”

I snort, and Havivah looks back to me from where she stirs the brewing tea. I smile sheepishly and tap my temple, indicating the ongoing message.

“Alright, my dear. I will...ah, I may well ask you more about this later, but thank you. It is good to know a bit more about this.”

“Of course, What Right Have I. Stay safe, say hello for me.”

As the duplex fades, I sigh and sit up straighter, enough of a noise and movement to get Havivah’s attention once more. “I was speaking with Rav and...ah, and she says that, yes, she at least worked on the affair because of our grandparents. She said that...ah, that she was, and I quote, fucking pissed about the whole thing.”

She laughs — that delightful cackle once more — as she gathers up a few folds of cloth from her apron and lifts the pot off the flame, carrying it gracefully over to the table. “I figured! It must have been by you a repudiation of all you grew up with.” And then she is off once more pulling two thick-walled clay tumblers from a shelf, dusting them off and setting them by the pot. Soon, there is a steaming mug of mint tisane for each of us.

A thought occurs to me and, though Havivah is not on my list of interviewees — though I think now that she should have been — I muse aloud, “I have been thinking some similar things about the Century Attack, yes? Do you think that...ah, that the Century Attack is this world’s Shoah?”

Lifting her tea and holding it in both hands, Havivah rests her elbows on her table and parks her nose just above the rim of the cup, breathing in the fragrant steam and watching me curiously for a long and silent moment. “This is part of your project?”

I splay my ears, abashed. “Yes. You do not need to answer if–”

“Azaria quit.”

The words thump against me, smack in the face it seems, and I jerk back. They tumble down into my lap and start to burn the pads of my paws. I squint my eyes shut at the sudden pain of them. I cast them away as I shake my paws, a tense flapping motion that my body undertakes without consulting the rest of me. I force my paws down once more and scrub my pads over my thighs.

When I do not respond, she continues. “This last New Year’s. We were eating up on the roof, waiting on the little concert that comes down through the streets. I made sfiha. We got a bottle of arak and were eating sfiha and drinking too much, and all his laughter, it was too loud, but I just thought he was drunk. Come midnight, he cried out — ‘ay!’ he cried — and tore his clothes. He clutched his chest and fell backwards out of his chair, then a few seconds later, he managed to quit.”

I try to stifle a tic, but it comes out as a muffled eep and another jerk of my head to the side.

“Come two days later, I find a note from him saying that it hurt too much, hearing all these things of people trying to kill all cladists, he just couldn’t take it anymore. Said he didn’t care if everything was safe now, he didn’t want to live in a world that could have two Holocausts.”

I try to reply, but all that comes out is a squeak. Tears and a squeak.

“Es tut mir layd, What Right Have I. I wasn’t planning on telling you at all, but once I started, I just couldn’t stop, it just all came out at once.” Only now do I see that, along with all of that oh-so-familiar slyness and playfulness, there is a tired tension in Havivah’s movements, a tightness in her expression.

It takes me a long time and half my cup of mint tea before I am able to reply in words. “I am sorry, Havivah. I did not know. He was a good man.”

“He was a dope. A real dope,” she says, that playfulness coming back, mixed half and half with tears. “It wasn’t another Holocaust. It was something new. Or maybe it was, but it wasn’t the second! You see, this is the thing I like about you. You didn’t go and say, ‘see, see, again with the Jews!’ like he did. You went to the Catholics and said ‘have a Feast of Restoration’ and you went to the Fennecists and say ‘have a Return to Dreaming’.”

I do not speak to correct her. I only lower my snout.

“See, you’re the mirror of all of that ability of us as humans to pull a Holocaust off. Humanity takes a look at some group and says, ‘no, no’, and tries to make them disappear. You look at humanity, and say ‘yes, yes’. All Azaria could ever do was look at a thing that happened and, if a Jew was involved, make it a Jewish thing, and if no Jew was involved, pretend it wasn’t real.” The energy is seeping out of her voice, now, and I can tell that all of this is taking its toll on her, but also that it is all coming to an end. “You saw it affected all of us, but that we all look at it differently, so you said, ‘however you celebrate a joy, celebrate like that.’”

I sigh. “You are not wrong. But...ah, but come, I did not mean to drag all of this to the surface. Are you okay?”

She finishes off her tea in one coarse swallow and then goes through a process of collecting herself, a visible wrangling of the emotions that leads to her sitting up straighter and composing her expression. “I was, and I will be. Again, I’m sorry. I don’t see you twenty years, and first thing I do is dump that on you.”

“No, I am glad you told me,” I say, smiling as earnestly as I am able. I do mean it, but the smile is difficult to manage. “His memory will be a blessing.”

Her shoulders slump, but only briefly. “Did you lose anyone?”

“No. Or, at least, I did not think so until...ah, until you told me this.”

She waves a hand vaguely. “Feh! I do not know if this counts. One old man getting too drunk and quitting a year after the fact, does that count?”

A year after the fact catches me strangely. It was two years after Lagrange died that Azaria quit, and yet less than a year after it came back. I force down the urge to say anything to this effect and instead shrug and sip my tea. “I do not know. It still...ah, well, I do not know.”

Without warning, and with an intensity that startles me, Havivah reaches across the table to grasp my wrist. A bit of the tea slops over the side of the cup, staining my fur with the scent of mint. “Stay here with me?”

“What?”

My reply, or perhaps my startled expression, leads to a sudden bashfulness in her. “Ah, don’t listen to me. Sudden bout of loneliness or something, or just a random connection. Crazy old Havivah, living in the past, just–”

“I will,” I say, then frown. The words were something more than automatic, but something less than a conscious decision. “For the night, or...ah, or however long you need, I will.”