Jewish American Identity and Jewish Philosophy in Maximum Recursion Depth 2

NOTE: I had been thinking about these things long before what happened recently at the Texas Synagogue, and had drafted this post beforehand as well. However, I thought I should at least acknowledge the events. As of this post, it is not entirely clear why this all happened, so I don't want to make any strong claims. If nothing else, it demonstrates how being Jewish American is not entirely the same as being white even when white-passing, and it also maybe demonstrates the effects of perpetuating hate, and why Jews especially should be mindful in how they engage with the world.

As with MRD1, there were a lot of big and abstract ideas swishing around in my head for a long time, without proper direction or framing, that eventually coalesced into something that felt meaningful, and in a covid-induced fugue state I now believe I've figured out what MRD2 will be.

This post is not the "formal announcement" of MRD2, I'm putting the cart before the horse, but in brief, it's going to be the Mecha game (shocking), and it'll be related to MRD1 both textually and subtextually, but also something that can exist separately.

This post is also not a bibliography of Jewish philosophy like I did with Buddhism in a Chinese historical context preceding MRD1; it touches on some specific Jewish concepts, but it's of a more personal nature.

Ezra Rose, an interesting Jewish queer tabletop RPG writer and artist I recently discovered

Personal Anecdote on Judaism and Jewish American Identity

My family on both sides are Ashkenazi Jews, in all cases having arrived in America in the very early 20th century; my great grandparents' or great great grandparents' generation. I don't know about the particulars of their religious background during that time, but at least when I was growing up, most of my family identified as Reformed Jews, a kind of Judaism that is less strict about a lot of the rules and traditions- for instance, we did not keep Kosher, we did not keep Passover although we did celebrate it, we did in general celebrate the major Jewish holidays but rarely did Shabbat, I was compelled to go to Hebrew school, and so on.

First, I want to remind that this is a personal anecdote, not a statement about all Reformed Jews, not to be used as ammo by bad faith anti-Semitic actors, and not even necessarily a statement about my specific Jewish community as a monolith, so much as my perception and experience within it, and how it has influenced me.

Being white-passing has its advantages, and despite all sorts of idiosyncrasies that continue to propagate in my family, there has been a through-line of people who were capable of thriving in society. I grew up upper middle class and everything that that entails. Most of my life I have lived in places with a sufficiently large, but also sufficiently integrated, Jewish community, which has allowed me to feel and identify mostly as a white American. Which is to say, I have fortunately not experienced much anti-Semitism first-hand; not none, but not a lot. Sadly, this privilege is such that many of the faults of white capitalist American society apply to the Jewish community I was raised in.

It felt perfunctory, disingenuous, inauthentic, and hollow. There was nothing about it that felt like it could not have been part of the toxic version of the American Capitalism Cult. The expression of the traditions were so clearly warped by 20th Century Americana, things my great grandparents' or grandparents' generations largely invented or adapted, for reasons that may have made sense in that time and place, but certainly had been emptied of any value and replicated uncritically by my parents' generation.

That's not to say there wasn't a sense of Jewish Identity or Jewish American Identity that came implicitly from the living culture, that made it unique, and that had intrinsic value. For better and worse, directly and indirectly, being Jewish and raised in a Jewish community impacted my worldview profoundly, but it was largely disconnected from the religion per se, or even the community and culture as a whole.

What does this have to do with MRD2?

First, I've harbored some guilt around using Buddhist themes and elements of Chinese fiction and mythology, and that interplay of Indian Buddhist influence on Chinese culture, in my game without that being my identity or lived experience, and the extent to which that's appropriation. I've made a point of acknowledging this here many times, and I tried to distance MRD1 from being too literalist in its interpretation of those cultures.

MRD2 isn't me trying to deny or denounce or distance myself from that. That would be disingenuous in itself. But, MRD2 will speak to this.

Also, in retrospect, it could be argued that that interplay of foreign ideas and how they integrated in China may have resonated with me in part as being at least somewhat analogous to Jewish American Identity in a Christian country, but that might be overstating things.

The qualms I have with Judaism and Jewish American Identity, the extent to which it's influenced my thinking but also the extent to which I feel distanced from it, will be leveraged as part of a juxtaposition of what MRD2 will represent as complemented to MRD1.

The Buddhist principles of MRD1 will still be in MRD2, likely both textually and subtextually, but there will also be an emphasis on certain elements of Jewish philosophy, likely even more idiosyncratic than my interpretation of Buddhist philosophy, in large part because the interpretations of Jewish philosophy per se as I understand them have not interested me or resonated with me nearly as much as e.g. Buddhism and Taoism, until I started reinterpreting them for myself very recently.

Which elements of Jewish Identity will be in MRD2? But first a medium-length-winded summary of some of the themes of MRD...

Again I'm very much putting the cart before the horse discussing all this stuff before actually giving the spiel on MRD2, but I'll try to make this work.

In MRD1 the PCs are Recursers, people with Karmic abilities operating in defiance of a dysfunctional bureaucracy as Poltergeist Investigators. They are attempting to subvert the system, while also acknowledging their personal failings and recognizing that they need to balance bettering themselves with bettering the world, or else they will fail at both. 

I don't mean to trivialize MRD1 when I say this, but to some extent, especially as a privileged white-passing person, there is an element of escapist fantasy to this. Even if Players are supposed to challenge their character's notions, they are still acting subversively in a way that is probably not quite as true to the lived experience of most of the people who would play the game, who have day jobs and are paying their taxes. The fact that MRD1 had Careers and it is stated that being Poltergeist Investigators is supposed to be their side hustle speaks to that somewhat, but I think in practice that gets de-emphasized in the game.

MRD2 is like the inverse; PCs are embedded within an exploitative capitalist system, having to grapple with their complicity in it- like we all do in the real world. It is assumed that PCs are specialists in their field (tentatively called Nazarites) being well compensated by a corporation, who also provide or fund upkeep for their Mecha and other tools. That's not to say that PCs can't eventually defy the corporation, but to do so should feel weighty, like if you were to actually try to get off the grid and escape capitalist society in the real world.

Acknowledging one's complicity is literally the least one can do aside from nothing, and is a necessary step to any kind of effective change.

So in this regard, it's an indictment of the Jewish community I was raised in as I perceive it, the ones who rest on the laurels of being white-passing, who voted for a fascist white supremacist to get tax cuts or because they actually believe in his white supremacy, because they failed to learn from their own history, because they cherry-picked whatever self-serving parts of an old book that they didn't read and don't understand, reducing their entire heritage to little more than a shibboleth.

What makes it so shameful, is that it is a moral test fitting of the Torah to be a privileged Jewish American confronting complicity in a broken system, which they so blatantly fail. Anyone who benefits from privilege must confront their complicity in an exploitative system. But as a white-passing and privileged Jewish American especially, you should know the consequences of weaponized hate, greed, and apathy, you should know the ephemerality of privilege, and so to deny your complicity for personal gain or out of cowardice, to not hold yourself or others accountable, is especially inexcusable.

I can't stress enough that this in itself is not an indictment of Judaism as a religion, nor of all Jews, only those who fail to pass the test.

So underlying that, it's an invitation to anyone who benefits from privilege, who is complicit in an exploitative system, to have permission to acknowledge that for what it is, without self-pity or hopelessness, but rather, with condemnation for those unwilling to do even that, and to think about whatever they can possibly do that would be less than nothing, in order to make the world and themselves better.

At it's core, it's about Tikkun Olam, or at least my interpretation of it. About recognizing that all things are systems and trying to understand and change them. Not in some passive and self-serving sense, but co-opting them through meaningful action. But, also acknowledging that the ability to do this is in itself a privilege, and that to do so uncritically is to do so passively and self-servingly, and so one must remain vigilant in themselves, just as in MRD1.

So I have made a genuine effort to better understand Jewish Philosophy, using Tikkun Olam as the entry point, and to find an interpretation of it which reflects my worldview and is compatible with the themes of MRD, both as a way of better understanding this part of my identity, but also so that, to the extent that Jewish Philosophy is represented in the setting, it is layered not just with the meaning of the philosophy per se, but also with my feelings on Jewish identity, and how that juxtaposes MRD1 and MRD2 as two ways of confronting broken systems.

Jewish Philosophy as reinterpreted by... Me

I am not giving formal definitions or an exhaustive history. If you're reading this you have the means to google or wiki for yourself. As I said at the beginning, this is not a bibliography. That said, I'll try to throw in some hyperlinks.

Tikkun Olam

A model world is made by modeling good behavior. Society is a system. Do not succumb to idols. Promote social justice. Do Mitsvot.

As a systems thinker, I really appreciate Tikkun Olam. It reminds me of Aristotelean Virtue Ethics. I'm sure there is a ton of minutia upon which one could argue about that, but anyway, I like the idea that through our actions as part of a greater whole, we can make a better world.

This idea of systems, of people as part of a whole, as identity coming from actions propagated within a system rather than as an innate thing, is a core part of MRD2. I'm starting with the discussion of Tikkun Olam, as opposed to some of the wilder metaphysical stuff, because this is the entry point towards the headier ideas of Jewish Metaphysics and Epistemology in MRD2.

The idols to be rejected in MRD2 can be the giant robot Mecha; they can also be corporations or corrupt or incompetent institutions, or the mental constructs we use to define ourselves in the absence of self criticism or a willingness to learn and grow or change, or the shibboleths which define a culture by the exclusion of others rather than by any value in itself, like jingoism and flag worship.

The system can be the metaphysics of God and its relationship to humans (and all things), or the mathematical and systems principles underlying our understanding of all things from geophysical phenomena, highway traffic, the economy, the cosmos, or human behavior.

The Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and a rejection of Duality in favor of Everything and Nothing

I read an idea that fundamentally changed the way I think about what Jewish ethics could be, and the relationship between Jewish ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. I don't know how much textual or theoretical support there is for this notion, but I much prefer it, so it's the interpretation I'm going for, and why not?

"Good and Evil" within this context is not literal, just a turn of phrase, it just means two halves of a whole, or "Everything". It's about God, or the oneness of God. To eat the forbidden fruit is to gain awareness of the Self at the cost of obfuscating awareness of the whole. We are nodes of a network, a superorganism that Jews and many others call God, and our concept of self is just an illusion, or delusion. It is Karma- attachment to the material world; it can be contextualized in terms of Sunyata, it's Theravada interpretation as no-self, or it's Mahayana interpretation as the emptiness of the universe and Buddha Nature.

God as a superorganism; Jewish Metaphysics divorced from theology per se; Faith not as blind acceptance of an idol but as the willingness to think systemically

I am generally a materialist and empiricist, I do not have faith in a theological God construct, I do not believe that a metaphysical God can have significance in a material world and still be God; most people would probably call me agnostic but I prefer to identify as atheist, if I must identify. These are among the reasons why I've found Judaism to be uncompelling in the past, because Jewish philosophy is so inextricably linked with faith in the oneness of God- a kind of Jewish Rationalism that is even less so compelling to me than Cartesian Rationalism because it's less parsimonious- "I think therefore I am" does not necessarily require God, although if I remember correctly Descartes tried to make that argument too but I stand by my claim for now. Anyway, this is also why I've found Buddhism more compelling, even if I wouldn't necessarily identify as Buddhist. While it acknowledges a non-material level of reality, it is a metaphysics not dependent on a God, and so its values can be more so appreciated as a framework even in the absence of the underlying metaphysics.

I have been interested in the concept of superorganisms for a long time, I believe it to be true but not in some ridiculous sci-fi sense even if I enjoy writing it that way, and I had logically considered the idea of God-as-superorganism. However, I had somehow never thought to actually recontextualize Jewish Philosophy in that way, but by substituting God with superorganism, it's allowed me to more so appreciate Jewish Philosophy as a whole.

From that perspective, the faith in the oneness of God is not faith in a theological construct (the ultimate idol / giant robot / corporation as far as I'm concerned...), it's faith in people and in the universe. It's acknowledging oneself as part of a whole and as a thing that can change and propagate in different ways. It's the ability to say "I believe X to be true, but I want to believe in Y instead, so I will strive to make Y", or to consider non-binary ideas like "From one perspective X is true and not Y, but from another perspective Y is true and not X, and both perspectives can be true". I believe there are similar ideas in Buddhism and formal logic and math, not going to try to articulate them but it may help connect the dots if you're not quite following.

Just like imaginary numbers are not "real" but can be used to explain waves and other complex math things, a metaphysical being might necessarily be incompatible with a material world, but also, to the extent that the material world is continuous with it, to the extent that it's all one big Panentheistic superorganism, it actually can meaningfully affect the material world.

In MRD1, the Numberless Courts of Hell were metaphors for dysfunctional bureaucracies, but also exploring psychological flaws and failings. In MRD2, the Quaos (temp name that I may or may not keep and is kind of an inside joke between myself and myself) is a metaphor for the self-created perils of the modern world like fascism and environmental destruction, and capitalism and colonialism, but it's also a metaphor for a Panentheistic universe, for a kind of metaphysics that can meaningfully intersect with the material world if one recognizes it all as part of a whole, that allows one to hold complex and seemingly contradictory thoughts and attempt to reconcile them, like being complicit in the failings of society and benefitting from privilege, but still wanting to make the world a better place.

A bit more context

I see the ideas expressed in my earlier blog post: Ironic post-capitalist pro-corporate sentimentality as an aesthetic or genre as being complementary to and informative of my thoughts on Jewish American Identity, complicity in an exploitative capitalist system, superorganisms, and of the direction of MRD2. While MRD2 will take a slightly different approach or perspective to it, they are conceptually coexistent.

Previous Mecha-related blog posts relating to the future of MRD2

Get into the Machine, Shinji!: Mecha Into the Odd hack proof of concept

"Gacha" Mecha Generator: System-Agnostic generator for making Mecha

Kaiju: Table of Weird & Wonderful giant monsters

Super Robot Wars-style Mecha: Table of Weird & Wonderful Mecha

Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time Not-Review: Discussion about the final movie in the Rebuild of Evangelion series

Saruri-Man: Midsummer Nights Adventures Not-Review: Discussion about a very obscure and Weird Mecha anime