This morning, I read Benjamin Rosenbaum's beautiful, playful and fascinating mytho-poetic rant about the history of monotheism here. Whatever you think about that sort of thing, its an interesting perspective and well put. (Personally, In the Beginning, I was a hard-core "religion is the opiate of the masses" teenage atheist. Then I flirted with a fairly serious brand of Judaism during my first couple years of college. Now I have officially Mixed Feelings and I don't know what to think. That's about as much spiritual exhibitionism as I feel like indulging in at the moment, but suffice to say that I still find the whole subject fascinating.) As an afterward to the main post, he had the following comment. I've seen him express this thought on his blog before, but its extraordinarily well-put and worth quoting in full:

"On that issue of Christianity and Judaism (among others) being post-Vespasian responses to and reimaginings of ancient Israelite religion, a little thought experiment:

"If King David were to find himself transported by time travelers to the modern era, and had a chance to look around and acculturate, whom would he be most comfortable with? To whom would he dedicate his considerable artistic, political, literary, and pugilistic talents?

"Got your answer ready? Here's mine:

"I think David was devoted to several things -- outside of art, wine, sex, deserving the loyalty of warriors, and a good party. I think he was concerned with passionate love of God; with the fortunes of his royal lineage; and with the fortunes of his nation.

"But his nation is gone. He wouldn't recognize the modern Israel (which is mostly situated where the Philistines were in his time), any more than he would modern Palestine (which is where Israel was) as anything like the nation he ruled, despite an abundance of people who revere him as an ancestor in one, and as a prophet in the other.

"He might recognize the land around Jerusalem -- but he wouldn't recognize the city, which is mostly Turkish, and surely bears no resemblance to whatever was there (if anything) when he got there.

"David was a king of a small embattled country, a promiscuous lover, a hot-blooded fighter, a passionate devotional singer to God, the kind of guy who'd get drunk and dance on the tables singing how God was going to liberate his nation, then get in a fight over a woman.

"He was also a monarchist.

"If he came back, he'd probably look for people of his sensibilities, who consider themselves monarchical vassals of the House of David and of his lineal descendants.

"And you know who that would be, right?

"The Rastafarians. (As Matisyahu seems to have figured out...)"

That's a good lead-in to something I was mulling over yesterday before I read the post quoted above. It was a nice night (by Michigan standards, anyway) and I was taking my dog on a walk and thinking about, you know, everything and nothing. (I've always found late-night dog-walking a really deeply relaxing, meditative experience conducive to free-associating creativity.) Among other things, I was remembering some bits of Talmud that I studied (in, needless to say, a very superficial way with every line having to be translated into English for my benefit...no Virginia, the author of these lines does not read Aramaic) with the local Chabad-affiliated Rabbis during the phase mentioned above, when I was living in Pittsburgh.

This in turn led to the following thought: Why is there so little speculative fiction based on this source material? In the collections of "Jewish science fiction and fantasy" I've looked through, it's hard not to notice that (aside from the stories where the speculative element comes purely from secular sf and the Jewish stuff forms the real-world element) the genre only seems to have heard of two speculative conceits taken from the Jewish tradition: golems and dybukks (sp?). In other words, the only Jewish fantasy source material people seem to write stories based off of is relatively historically recent Eastern European Jewish mystical folklore. Nothing wrong with that, it's cool and interesting stuff and lots of great stories have been and can be weaved out of it. (I'm particularly fond of a story called "Breath of Clay.") It's cool stuff. No doubt.

But its not all there is. There's a treasury of source material out there that no one seems to be using. (I mean, I'm sure soembody is, somewhere...I'm not claiming to be exhaustively well-read in this stuff by any stretch, but for the most part it seems to have escaped the attention of would be subgenre-builders as reflected in anthologies of this sort of thing.) You don't have to go to Eastern Europe in the last few hundred years to find source material in Judaism for literature of the fantastic.

(One hypothesis that strikes me as possibly explaining this is that Jewish sf writers are more likely than not to be most familair with from their upbringing, current practice, etc., the more liberal strands of the religion, in which the 'legalistic' stuff takes a distant second place in emphasis, and even mystically inclined writers tend to skip in their areas of interest straight from the biblical period to Lurianic Kabbala, with scant attention to the literature in between.)

For example (bringing me back full circle to Pittsbugh), when peopel are studying Daf Yomi (a page-a-day from the Babylonian Talmud with the major commentators) one of the first things they will come to (as a minor after-thought by commentators dealing with a largely unrelated discussion of halachic nitty-gritty) is the following: One of the reasons one should avoid abandoned buildings (besides the more obvious safety hazards) is that its well-known that demons gravitate towards and infest such buildings. Obviously. Similarly, one can find others discussions in such texts (I don't have the references handy) to things like demons, alternate dimensions and the (not necessarily malevolent) creatures that live there, etc. I'm not saying that you'll find a lot of this sort of thing, but if memory serves you find a smattering of delightfully vague, suggestive hints of such things in the most surprising places like rabbinical commentaries on laws about the division of property and things like that. The point being that there's a lot of material there that a lot more could be done with than (my impression is) has been done.