Wisdom of the Ancient Geeks
Wisdom of the Ancient Geeks
On Music, Video Games, and Religious Consciousness
It’s time to have the talk. Yes, I mean the one about being a geek.
Having just finished confessing my sins on Yom Kippur, I am ready to confess to you, dear reader, that I am a geek at heart. And I’m not alone. Throughout the many subcultures of the modern geek world, Jews have thrown themselves in with rabbinic devotion, mastering the canons and conversations of each of its forgotten realms — fantasy, science-fiction, TV, movies, pop culture, gaming, and beyond.
Talmudic culture has two terms for the mastery of a subject: iyyun — in-depth learning, and beki’ut — wide-ranging knowledge.
As a geek, I can only claim the latter. I have familiarity with a range of literatures and subjects that might be discussed at your typical Comic Con panel: I can argue about ethics in Star Trek; compare the worlds of the great fantasy novelists like J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Neil Gaiman, Terri Pratchett, and George R.R. Martin; bemoan the cancellation of Firefly after one glorious season; grow verbose about video games from Mario to Minecraft; don my Jester’s Cap for Magic: the Gathering; and play a respectable D&D campaign.
But I’ve never gone all in. When it comes to all things geek & sundry, I have always chosen beki’ut (bekius, for the yeshivish among us) over iyyun. Breadth over depth.
That is because the latter scares me.
Not Halloween-scary. But I remain wary because the ways of the geek are without end; its ever expanding canon of games, books, and paraphernalia can take on almost a religious dimension. Peering over the precipice, the neophyte nerd will soon discover a bottomless pit of pop culture beckoning the beholder towards free-fall, forever forming a faith that her alternative worlds will ultimately be more real than the one around us.
The realization of the religious impulse behind geek culture is not a new idea. I am sure that there are dozens of writers on the matter. My teacher, Cantor Jack Kessler z’’l, had a sci-fi-inspired Jewish band called Klingon Klezmer. My rabbinic colleagues Andrew Pepperstone and Lindsay-Healey Pollack even recently developed a podcast on sci-fi and fantasy through a Jewish lens.
But recently I’ve been thinking deeper, and more practically, about the Torah of another rising digital realm — video games.
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II. The Seeker and the Game
Video games are a particularly active form of alternative universe — one in which one does not simply observe, but instead exercises real agency in an unfolding digital story. You can help Mario save the princess, uncover the mysteries of Cortana as the Master Chief, or pursue a life of crime in Grand Theft Auto. A new generation of MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) role-playing games now offer an eternity of alternative worlds and social interaction with other gamers throughout the world. With such endless and abundant digital stories, it is easy to plug in and drop out.
My parents understood something about this instinctively. This is why we never owned a video game system. I could play it at a friend’s house, or rent it on my birthday. But it was always a treat, never a meal.
Yet with over sixty percent of the American population playing video games, maybe I am selling this genre short. Tablet magazine editor and longtime video game enthusiast Liel Liebovitz thinks so; in his essay “The Godliness of Gaming,” he goes so far as to argue that video games offer a far richer theological experience than expected:
“Prance around your island for a bit, and you’ll see that video games, like all rituals, are an exercise in deepening our comprehension through repetition. These games don’t rely on your brain, that easiest of all organs to burden with bad information and fraudulent ideas. They appeal directly to the human spirit, which wants not to understand but to do. Do you want to see what the world is like? Walk around. Do you want to understand others? Share their space. Do you want to know yourself? First, get out of your own head by making decisions that affect the weal and woe of others.”
Liebovitz and I agree on the spiritual questions and even ethical dilemmas that live behind the playful spirit of the video game world. The creation of digital stories, spaces, cultures, and rules comprises a meticulous craft of “world-building.” Game designers must deeply imagine an complete alternative universe in which they hope their gamers will play, explore, and make important decisions. This is not dissimilar to the detailed religious world-building envisioned by the process of Jewish law (halacha). Indeed, the “world-building” concept is even used by the traditional-egalitarian Hadar Institute, describing their own intentional process of envisioning and building a new Jewish religious landscape for future generations.
This hits close to home, as I consider, like my parents before me, what kind of world we are building for our children and what relationship to video games should be taught in our family.
Unsurprisingly, this came to a head on a question of music.
III. Video Game Music in the Synagogue?
As a a parent, I fight the same battle that is being waged for the souls of our youth against the dangers of screens, phones, and social media. We try to keep these devilishly addictive devices very limited in our own home. Yet I know that their alternative worlds occupy significant real estate in the hearts of humankind, both adults and children.
For reference: my eldest can give forty-five minute lectures about Minecraft. He has not only played the games, but watched videos and consumed books (from the library, no less) on the finer points of the game’s quests and world-building features.1
Part of my parenting quest is to sublimate his relentless passion for Minecraft into other fields. I am confident his voracious intellect could save the real world, not just the digital one. But how to make the bridge?
I first asked myself this question when presented with the reality that our public and private schools are actually using video games to teach academic subjects. My kid came home one day bubbling with prose about Prodigy, a fantasy role-playing game punctuated by intermittent schoolwork (For the gamers out there, think Final Fantasy III with math problems during battles).
What I observed most about the game was not just the storyline or the schoolwork, but the musical soundtrack. Each region and experience in the video game had its own niggun — its own melody. I would hear bits of these melodies buzzing out from iPads or wafting into the sonic air in moments of youthful idleness. And I wondered — could I put this music to work for God?
Video game music is a huge industry, with not only iconic tunes from classic games but a burgeoning market with many artists collaborating in order to be the soundtrack of the latest big hit. And some of these games actually contain tons of real-world repertoire. The shantyman Seán Dagher, for example, adapted tons of traditional sea shanties for the massive online role playing game, Assassin’s Creed IV, introducing millions of gamers to this canonic repertoire of nautical niggunim.
I have only attended one geek convention in my life. Ironically, it was a con dedicated to video game music. MAGFest, a Music & Games (MAG) convention, was once hosted in my hometown of Alexandria, Virginia. Swimming in a sea of geek, I was amazed at the depths to which music was celebrated as integral to the life and spirit of the video game world.
Ten years later, I now wonder as a Jewish dad if I can successfully pull from the world of video game music to inspire my children. Thinking over the repertoire of its music, I asked my son if we could develop a Jewish service supplemented with melodies from Prodigy. He expressed interest, and we experimented together to see which melodies would fit the prayers with both appropriate nusach (liturgical chant) and a sufficiently devotional ethos.
One Sunday morning, I decided to try this experiment on Hebrew School kids. After a few opening songs, I taught this tune from Prodigy, simplifying the melody and adding an au courant vocabulary of Hasidic vocables.
(With sufficient alterations and yu-ba-bums, it goes over well as an old-style el adon).2
My students thought the melody was from Germany, Poland, or even Israel. That just shows you how Ashkenazi vowels and intonation can transform any tune.3 Revealing the video game source of the song, I asked the question: should we use melodies from video games in synagogue? A spirited discussion ensued.
Both the students and me were of two minds. These melodies are taken from real digital realms which had significance for the students. Perhaps they could transfer the positive associations from one alternative world to the world building of the traditional liturgy.
But then again, this kind of borrowing cuts both ways — and it always has. One of the unintentional discoveries of my research has been the transfer of the musical repertoire of the European tavern into Ashkenazi religious life — both at festive meals (se’udot) and then in the synagogue. The egalitarian, boisterous, and musically rich ethos of the tavern gradually found its way from the secular to the sacred, fomenting social transformations from the outside world within the spaces of Jewish prayer.
This perhaps had some positive effects, but its negative effects were also undeniable. So too — should we fear the backwash from video game tunes into the sacred cup of synagogue music?
As my colleague Dr. Amanda Ruppenthal Stein recently reminded me, “Jewish music” is music that is used for Jewish purposes. So like Portuguese Jews doing kaddish to the Baroque music of Conrad Friedrich Hurlebusch, Chabad hasidim adopting the “Marseillaise,” orthodox pop borrowing from techno, or Hamilton being used for Adon Olam, maybe this is just a classic instance of sacred borrowing.
But that is not all that is at stake. We are living in a major inflection point in the battle between in-person culture versus artificial culture.4 Synagogues remain some of the last places that you can go and sing, in person, with other people and for a transcendent purpose. And so part of me is inclined to view Jewish music as a fortress against this —a repertoire of resistance, building an altogether different world.
With the heart of a geek, I appreciate my eldest’s love of the digital world he can build and master, and within which he can express and explore. I only wish to create that same experience for him in his Judaism. I asked him about my question, and was heartened that he made a suggestion for this article — that perhaps we can see video games, whatever the soundtrack, as metaphors for good Jewish living. Like Pac-Man (this is his example), we should chase the illuminated dots of good deeds while avoiding the ghost gang of the yetzer hara.
That’s some beautiful Torah to hear from your kid. Maybe there are yet hidden paths out there from screen-based geekdom to a piety of presence. It will take listening and collaboration to discover them.
As it is written: “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”
I never thought I would have so many conversations about mobs that weren’t referring to angry ones.
Those who want a recording of my adaptation, feel free to write me directly.
With my cantorial students, I call this technique “antiquing the furniture.”
The practicing of “rawdogging” on flights is a fascinating new backlash to screen culture. I will write on its relationship to the traditional Jewish Sabbath in a future post.