• Published 29th Apr 2022
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Seeking - Fillyfoolish



Sunset Shimmer knows Equestrian religion is false. She has her doubts about human religions, too. As always, she turns to her friends for help. Unfortunately for Sunset, her six friends have six rather different ideas about what lies above.

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Friday

“Shabbat Shalom, Twilight!”

A man with a small black cloth balanced on his head waves. Next to me, Twilight Sparkle fiddles with a pair of bobby pins, attempting to attach a rainbow cap to her head. She pauses to wave at the man and reply in kind, “Shabbat Shalom, Mr. Brown.”

“Please, Winter’s fine. ‘Mr. Brown’ just makes me feel old.” He chuckles at his own joke, while Twilight’s lips curl politely. As he speaks, it dawns on me that his deep, scratchy voice reflects years of vocal damage. Cigarettes, most likely. “I see you’ve brought a friend.”

Satisfied that the cap will stay on, Twilight gestures between the man and me with her newly free hand. “Sunset, this is Winter Brown, a congregant at Beth Chaim. Winter, this is Sunset Shimmer, my girlfriend.” I grow pink at the introduction. A little knot twists in my stomach. Twilight and I still share the daily butterflies of young love, but I’ve heard human religions don’t look kindly upon same-gender relationships, let alone interfaith ones. Simply entering the synagogue beside Twilight tempts fate. To hear her introduce us so casually to an elderly religious gentleman?

Let’s just say I’m grateful my motorcycle is parked outside for a quick getaway for two.

Winter Brown turns to me. “Shabbat Shalom, Sunset. Twilight’s told me a lot about you.” Judging by Twilight’s sudden blush, those conversations were not intended for my ears.

Ignoring my better judgement, I mirror his smile. “Good evening, Winter.”

Winter nudges Twilight. He whispers all too loudly, “Twilight, you never told me she was a goy.”

“Mr. Brown!” Twilight chides. I don’t need to speak Yiddish to spot gossip, the unflattering sort judging by Twilight’s reaction. I glance at the door, clench my jaw, and suck in a breath.

“Pah.” Winter swats his hand. Twilight’s glare doesn’t budge. Winter smiles at me. “Welcome to Beth Chaim. Any friend of Twilight’s is a friend of mine.”

Although Twilight relaxes, my eyebrows raise through the ceiling. “We’re not just friends. That train left the station months ago.”

“Sunset!” Twilight’s gaze pierces mine, and the expansions and contractions of her chest grow more pronounced to my immediate regret.

Oblivious, Winter laughs. “Oh, I know that.” He winks at me. “I already have a suit picked out for the wedding.” I open my mouth, but before I can object, he adds, “Don’t say you’re too young. You’re both well over Bat Mitzvah age. You girls just need to pick out rings and a date.”

Let’s blame the flames in my cheeks for my inability to think of a retort. Twilight surely has that excuse: she is now preoccupied running her fingers across the spines of books on a nearby cart. Twilight selects two books but keeps her back turned away from the conversation.

Winter’s teasing grin softens to a genuine smile. “All I’m saying, if you were looking for a nice Jewish girl, you made a great choice.”

I steal a glance at Twilight’s back, tack on a confident grin, and drop the blush. “I wasn’t looking, but I certainly found one. Isn’t that right, Twi?”

Twilight squeaks, turning towards the conversation and shoving an upside-down book at my chest. Or maybe a backwards book? She looks like she might burn up if Winter and I keep chatting. “How about we find our seats?” She flashes an all-too-wide grin at Winter. “Good to catch up with you! I… I need to show Sunset the siddur before the service starts. Okay! Thank you!” She throws her head towards the room’s interior.

I wave to Winter. “It was great meeting you.” He returns the gesture with an amused smile, but before I can comment, Twilight tugs the side of my shirt, taking me with her to some empty seats in front of a raised platform. Once we approach the farthest seats in the row, she sits down and exhales.

I sit beside her. “I’m sorry for embarrassing you.” I click my tongue, and she seems to forgive me, until I continue, “Okay, I’m not that sorry. Please understand how hard it is to resist. You’re so cute when you’re flustered.” True to my word, she turns adorable. “Wait, should I not be flirting with you in a synagogue? Is that bad?”

She giggles. “I mean, it’s not great. Probably a little sacrilegious, but nobody’s going to call you on it.”

I bite my lip. “Sacrilegious because we’re both girls?”

“No.” She kisses me on the cheek. “Because we’re in a place of worship.”

I throw up my hands in defeat. “Fair enough.”

She holds my hand. “I know you’re worried about being seen with me here, but I promise, nobody minds. And if they do, they’ll have Winter to deal with. You do not want to cross that man.”

“No?” I squeeze her hand.

“He served in the army.” Twilight shivers. “Super scary stuff.”

I glance over to the octogenarian in question, who is now greeting another congregant. “Uh-huh. Terrifying.”

Another giggle. “You’re teasing me.”

“Always.” I cup my hands over my head, forming a little halo.

She swats my hands away and kisses me on the lips.

I kiss back.

“I…” She extracts herself out of the situation. “I admit that more observant Jews might object to us. But sapphism isn’t outright condemned in the Torah, so I’m happy for our story to be a midrash snuck into a little loophole between two letters in Leviticus.”

“What’s a midrash?”

“Midrashim are rabbinic stories that fill in the gaps of the scripture, or raise questions about it. ‘Midrash’ is Hebrew for ‘study’. Indeed, the reading and writing of midrashim is a component of Jewish religious study.” She blinks and rephrases in a dull nasal, “It’s rabbis writing fanfiction.”

“Gotcha.” I form my hand into an okay sign.

After a moment of silence, Twilight sighs dramatically. “On further thought, I’m sorry, but I don’t think me dating you is kosher.”

I droop. “Why not?”

She leans over to nibble on my hair, and whispers in my ear, “It’s prohibited to eat bacon. It’s treif.”

I bonk her head with mine. “Very funny, Twilight.”

She grins.

“Okay, joking aside…” I glance at her prayer book. “Do you believe in God?”

She nods. “Yes, but not in the way you expect. Are you familiar with deism?”

I shake my head.

“So, imagine you understood every law of physics – even the laws governing Equestrian magic – and they turn out to be deterministic.”

“Sure.”

“That means at every instant, what happens is a pure function of what happened an instant prior. By extension, the world today is determined by the initial state of the universe during the Big Bang. That means there’s no room for miracles, no room for free will, probably no real consciousness.”

I frown. “That seems bleak, and a bit unlikely.”

“Maybe.” She shrugs. “Determinism is admittedly challenged by new findings in quantum mechanics. I’m not an expert, but it seems that some interpretations of quantum mechanics imply there really is randomness in the world.”

“Is that good or bad?”

She shrugs again. “Neither. It just is. At any rate, the key idea – that the universe is a self-driving system – still holds. The universe doesn’t need God to call the shots. After the Big Bang, the laws of physics have reigned supreme. The universe becomes a machine, a computer, integrating equations over time. The evolution of intelligent life is a happy accident.”

“I don’t know if I buy that.” I bring my hand to my chin. “What created the universe? Or the laws it obeys? What caused the Big Bang? Physics says that energy is conserved, so what put in all that energy?”

“Whatever did,” Twilight replies, “you may as well call God. It’s easy for me to believe in. It’s not a useful belief, though. There’s no sense dwelling on it.”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

She pauses. “Acknowledging a Creator doesn’t affect my daily life. It doesn’t change how I live. Creating the universe doesn’t grant a being moral authority over its inhabitants, you know?”

“Uh, no, I don’t know.” I’m not sure what I expected her to answer, but it wasn’t that.

She chuckles. “Earth is the teensiest speck of a massive universe. The solar system is a rounding error compared to all that exists. From what I understand, Equestria is even smaller. Do you think the Creator of everything gives a damn about humans and ponies?” I wince. “Human ethics are questions for humans to work out. My ancestors did their best to provide answers when they wrote the Torah, the holy scripture.” She glances around and lowers her voice. “The first five books of what Christians call the ‘Old Testament’ of the Bible.”

I try to process her answer and find myself gesturing my hands around the synagogue. “Are these traditional Jewish beliefs?”

“Not at all, but that doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t make me less Jewish. Judaism cares more about doing the right thing than believing the right thing.” She adds with a giggle, “And even if I do the wrong thing, a Jew is a Jew. Speaking of, do you know how conversion to Judaism works?”

I shake my head. “If Judaism is about practice, not belief? I guess you have to observe the Jewish laws and then you’re a Jew.”

“If only!” She laughs. “Traditional Judaism is hard. There are over six hundred laws that Jews are supposed to follow. Non-Jews have just seven, and they’re pretty basic. If a person isn’t Jewish, it’s better that they stay that way. That’s why we don’t proselytize Judaism. It’s not like someone converting to Judaism helps us.”

“Huh. What if you want to convert anyway? You know, someone like me, full of hubris and never satisfied with anything less than perfection.”

She beams and leans in against me. “Then you have to ask a rabbi very nicely, and hope they say yes.”

“Will they?”

“According to tradition? Probably not.” She laughs. “But you can come back later and ask again.”

“So you have to ask twice?”

“Eh, they’ll say no the second time too.”

“This system is ridiculous.”

“Hey, it’s not all bad,” she says. “By the fourth time or so you ask, they’ll say yes. Then you have a mikveh, a ritual bath, and you’re a Jew.”

“Wow. Why do you bring all this up?”

“Well, there’s this joke.” She bites her lip then repeats it quietly. “Other religions make it easy to join. Judaism makes it hard to join… but impossible to leave.”

“Got it.” I laugh. “Your family is Jewish, though. You didn’t go through all that, right?”

“No, I can’t say I did.”

“So, I realize you don’t have much choice, but… Do you like being Jewish?”

She scrunches up her face adorably. “That’s a bit of a weird question. Do you like being Equestrian?”

“Hmm, do I like being a literal magical unicorn? Yeah, I think so. What’s your excuse?”

“Eh, tradition?” She waves around her hand. “Look, the Torah is an excellent work of literature, featuring great allegories, compelling characters, and a clear moral. What’s not to like?”

“Fair, fair.” My mind drifts as I process her unorthodox theology. “Okay, this is unrelated, but can I ask a dumb question?”

Twilight bites her creased lip. “It isn’t dumb if you ask it.”

I exhale an airy laugh. “Why are our books upside-down?”

She perks up at the opportunity to infodump. “Oh, the prayers are written in Hebrew, plus a bit of Aramaic. Semitic languages – Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic – are written from right-to-left. As such the book is read from right-to-left. That means the orientation of the binding is reversed from English-language books.” She opens her book to a random page and points at the page numbers, which indeed increase from right-to-left.

“You can read Hebrew, then?”

Twilight nods. “Your book has transliterations, so you don’t have to, but yeah. Growing up, Bubbe Sparkle took me to shul every Saturday. That stopped when Bubbe and Zayde moved to Miami. But for a while, every week, I used the time as an educational opportunity to study Hebrew linguistics.”

“Worth it?”

“Probably not.” She giggles. “In high school I did email an Israeli physics professor at Technion in his native language, so that must count for something.”

“Sure.” I mull over the implications of Twilight’s connection to her religion hinging on understanding a foreign language and wonder how deep the multilingualism goes. “What about your name?”

She tilts her head at me. “What about it?”

“Why don’t you have a Hebrew name?”

“Actually, I do.”

I raise an eyebrow. “‘Twilight Sparkle’ sounds pretty Equestrian to me.”

“But does Dimdum bat Or V’ketifa?”

I blink. “No?”

“Ah.” She sticks out her hand expectantly. “Sh’mee Dimdum. Pleased to meet you.”

I laugh. “Enchantée.”

She scoots closer to me in her seat, letting her arm touch mine, a fact I try to ignore even without nosy onlookers to worry about. “Hebrew names are useful for religious purposes. But you’re right, ‘Twilight Sparkle’ isn’t a traditional Jewish name. My parents lived in Canterlot their whole lives; the influence isn’t so strong. But if you look at someone like Winter, it’s a different story.”

It’s my turn to tilt my head. “‘Winter Brown’ is a Jewish name?”

Her face turns downcast. “He was born Braun, not Brown. His mother changed their last name when he was an infant, when they immigrated after the Shoah.”

“The…?”

She looks at her feet, and every trace of warmth disappears. “The Holocaust.”

I choke on my breath. “Oh.”

I will never understand the extent of human cruelty, let alone over something as trivial as religion.

Maybe I should keep that triviality in mind the next time I start stressing.

Whatever else Twilight might have said on the subject is cut off by chanting from the front of the sanctuary.

“Hinei mah-tov uma-na’im…”

Chanting along, Twilight opens her prayer book to a page in the back – rather, in the front, from the right. She places her open book on her lap, opens mine to the same page, and points to a spot on the page for me.

“Shevet achim gam-yachad.”

Her fingers hover over Hebrew letters that bear no resemblance to my native alphabet. To the left of the Hebrew I see gibberish, but at least it’s gibberish in letters I recognize.

Twilight – and the congregation – repeat the sentence.

“Hinei mah-tov uma-na’im, shevet achim gam-yachad.”

I think I catch onto the pattern, but the rhythm changes, slowing down to emphasize each vowel.

“Hi… nei… mah tov…”

…and I try my luck, mumbling out with the crowd,

“Shevet achim gam-yachad. Hi.. nei… mah tov, shevet achim gam-yachad”

I don’t sound like much, barely whispering in case I mess up. Although her gaze remains fixed on the leader at the podium at the front of the room, Twilight’s lips curl up, and she nuzzles up against me.

Underneath the Hebrew is a single line of translation.

How good it is, and how pleasant when we dwell together in unity.

I curl up against Twilight.

Good and pleasant indeed.