Kaddish

I have been thinking about what it is that has led to these last almost two weeks feeling so refreshing.

The larger part of it, I have decided, is that I have left Beth Tikvah. I am no longer surrounded by my books, by my office and apartment, by the same town that I have lived in for centuries now. I am no longer surrounded by the same people as always. I have not seen Rav in two weeks — though I have messaged her at least once a day to keep in touch; I do not wish to leave her in the dark, nor, I now realize, to be wholly without her presence — or Erin, or Shai, or Joseph. I have left behind my routine.

Instead, I am surrounded by strangers and crowds. Far less, now that the holiday is over, mind! I no longer feel quite so hemmed in by their presence, actual or perceived, for I feel the presence of others as a sort of weight on my shoulders. The streets are busy, as they must be with the other residents of this particular Jerusalem and the tour groups that come through during the day, but they are not so unbearably crowded.

Having left behind my routine, I have instead been nudged to help out with those tours. It is a task gladly taken up. I have done it in the past, of course, but also, it is a job that very quickly starts to feel like showing people around my home town. I have not lived here in some decades, but it remains as familiar as ever.

“From the beginning, the goal of this sim was to be historically accurate,” I said, voice raised above the noise of the city near the Pool of Siloam. I had been given charge of a group of visiting teachers and professors, with the understanding that I would be a good fit for them. I could see why; they all bore the marks of various hyperfixations, special interests, and other traits I see so often in myself.

Collecting a group like this is potentially dangerous, but everyone had been quite kind and well-behaved so far. There had been only one snippy comment from one scholar to another as we descended from the Essene gate to the pool.

I brushed my paws down over my skirt and apron — my trousers having been traded out for something a bit more accurate — and continued in my explanation. “Much of the initial investment was...ah, much of that energy was spent on accuracy, of course, yes? The works of our friend here, Doctor Nazaryan, for instance, gave us all the information we needed on the construction of Hezekiah’s tunnel, which brings water from...ah, from the Gihon spring to the Pool of Siloam, here.”

A slight man, who had been practically vibrating with anticipation leading up to our arrival at the pool, bobbed his head in acknowledgment. I could see the muscles standing out as cords in his arms, crossed tight against his front as though to bodily hold himself back from leaping in to water and wading up to the mouth of the tunnel to check our work.

I paused to let some of the group remove their sandals and step into the water to bathe their feet and, in one case, splash water up over themselves. It was not a very warm day, but neither had it been necessarily all that cool, and so I do not blame them for this.

Once we collected ourselves again and began the slow trek up along the stepped road, I continued speaking. “We continued then through the first few decades of...ah, of our planned recreation, beginning with the reign of Salome Alexandra. Our goal was to begin with the so-called ‘golden age’ of the Hasmonean period and continue to the fall of Jerusalem.”

“How did you handle historical personages?” asked an attendee.

I am unsure of their gender, Aaron-4-c Shaviro, and their pronouns in the perisystem architecture are the default-gray epicene that all new uploads start with. While they have not made public their upload date, this fact and a few other attributes about them and their behavior point to a relatively new upload — perhaps less than a decade.

However, their form was of a series of chaotically intersecting flat planes in an oil-sheen rainbow hue. The intersections of those ‘tiles’ appeared to form the outline of a standard bipedal humanoid form. In deference to the dress code of the sim — not strictly enforced at the moment, but certainly still encouraged — reflected within these tiles as though through a mirror were the shifting folds of linen that marked an approximation of period dress. It was quite distracting, but in a lovely way; I have seen many who eschew the strictly human form and many choices are lovely indeed — particularly their choice of ‘clothing’ — but the shifting chromatic aberations that washed over their tiles as they moved kept catching my eye.

It was a rejoicing in life sys-side. That is a thing I most certainly appreciate.

“Did someone,” they expanded, “for lack of a better term, play Shelomtzion?”

I nodded, offering a hint of a smile before returning my gaze to our slow progress up the stepped road, lest I stub a claw. “Yes, Professor Shaviro. Many of...ah, many of the core participants in the sim are actors and they often set forks to act out the appropriate roles, maintaining as much historical consistency as possible.”

“‘Historical consistency’?” I could hear the beginning of a sneer in their voice.

I resisted the urge to rise into defensiveness. “Also in the core are several historians, myself included — though...ah, though I will note that I am in no way credentialed as an historian — who provide scripts from which these historical personages may read, yes? Often, they appeared only during scheduled events. While the sim runs in full recreation mode for half the year, day-to-day recreation focuses on much smaller-scale stories.”

They walked in silence, and there was a suggestion of thoughtfulness about them. They did not have hands, nor did they have pockets, and yet there was a sense about them of them stuffing their hands in their pockets while they thought.

At last, they said, “I see. And this is why you deviated?”

Called back to the original lecture, I spoke up. “Ah. Right, yes. While we began with the plan to follow this history, we quickly began to deviate, and for many reasons. There was...ah, rather, for instance, there was the question of what to do about wars, yes? We — both the core cast and the regular participants — found that we did not have the stomach for the gruesome. We did not wish to actually play out violence against the poorer inhabitants of the city.”

“The curse of LARP,” another attendee, a lanky trans woman named Iosefina, said with a dramatic eyeroll, getting a laugh from our little crowd, including myself. We are no strangers to history and the role in which the less advantaged play.

“Indeed. We were...ah, we were not willing to run a milsim. We were unwilling to be cruel, or to have cruelty enacted upon us, yes?” I smiled as I looked out over the fronts of buildings lining the stepped way, and the other groups, docents, and actors that we came across. “And so we slowly let the plot fade. The progression of the years slowed to a stop, and now we are...ah, well, we are running our own stories in what is basically an early Herodian Jerusalem. It has become an alt history sim.”

The collection of facets that was Aaron-4-c made a noise that sounded rather like an amused snort, though I realized that, without the visual cues that accompany such, I had to work a little harder to understand such things. “I suppose that also means you have not needed to concern yourselves the Jesus problem.”

Responses from the group were largely pained amusement. Even Dr. Nazaryan, who had been peering back at the pool of Siloam and trying to glance out past the walls of the city — not easy from our current vantage — toward the spring it draws from managed a chuckle.

“Indeed. The purpose of our lives here is...ah, well, it is in many ways associated with Second Temple Judaism, but it is more associated with life in the Ancient Near East, yes? That we are doing so as Jews is...mm, it is a fact that falls out of the reality of the era; the Jews were a people as much as — if not more than — they were members of a religion, yes?”

“Does that definition not still hold?” Aaron-4-c asked.

“Depends on if you’re talking to a Jew or not,” Iosefina said. Her laugh is a joy.

The team at the sim’s lobby — a sort of combination ticket office, orientation room, and lecture hall that exists separate from the sim itself — works to assign groups of visitors to a docent who will best fit them based on several factors before the tours ever begin, and I am pleased that they have gotten so good at their jobs over the years. I have heard tales from before I ever joined when groups were thrown together without much thought, back before much screening was done, and Messianic types would derail every tour for days on end. There are now several procedures in place to ensure that groups proceed smoothly through our town. There are two docents who are trained to engage comfortably with Christians and Messianic Jews ­— who are usually also Christian — who wish to tour our sim instead of one of the ones dedicated to their theology, and we are all trained with what to do if we are confronted with cases of Jerusalem Syndrome.

I am thankful for these things, but I am most thankful that they will consider the visitors’ knowledge, interests, and personalities when matching them with a docent.

This crowd with me was so easy to be with! Iosefina had a certain wit about her that I adored. It was the type of wit that is quick and sharp without being so quick as to make me feel slow or so sharp as to risk offense. Aaron-4-c was intriguing in their form and approach to identity, not to mention the formality of speech that echoes, in many ways, that of my own. Dr. Nazaryan had a depth of knowledge about the era that was astounding, and whenever the crowd invited him to infodump, he did so with joy, and came to a graceful stop each time without apologies.

When I mentioned that I wished to stay for the public season and that I was open to run tours — not something that I had done much in the past — the lobby team had interviewed me over the course of about four hours. They were careful to specify that, rather than judging my suitability, for my time in the sim over the decades had already proved such, they were creating a profile for this very reason. Thus, we spoke less about qualifications, and more about how I interacted with others.

We spoke about knowledge and my feelings on it. They spoke about the joy of hyperfixation. They spoke about the utility of autistic infodumping.

At one point early on, they asked me about social anxiety and the origin of my stammer, which does indeed get worse in situations where I am more anxious. I told them about the core of anxiety that drives me, and how I have come to channel it into a positive force within my life. I told them about the person I had dated about a century ago, who had told me that I spoke too much, used too many words, about how I learned to stop in the middle of speaking and judge how I should continue, and that is why it happens most often during conjunctions and explanations. I asked if they would like me to work on smoothing out my speech, and they got such a look of distress on their faces at the very idea that I knew that they would never ask this of me, and indeed, none of my tour members ever have, either. It is merely another fact that they consider when choosing the groups.

What a wonder it is to have friends! How easy it is to be kind! When I have sought out help in moving through the world, I have been granted it, yes, for I have a therapist whom I love and who loves me too, and I have already spoken before about the utility of diagnoses less as sentences coming down from on high and more as frameworks to help me move through the world, but also what joy! What joy that I have friends who are kind and who see these things as joyous parts of me, things without which I would be incomplete, and with which, I am all the more beautiful.

Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, melech ha’olam, she’asani b’tzelem Elohim; blessed are You, divine sovereign of the universe, who made me in the image of God– who, having stretched the measuring line when building the Earth’s foundations– who, having determined the season wild goats give birth– who, able to pull up Leviathan with a fishhook, could certainly understand the simple urges of an anxious, autistic woman in the years after the world ended, and know that sometimes, loving-kindness means merely being understood.