sovay: (Rotwang)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2021-02-08 08:18 pm

What I want is to run and hope it falls away

The majority of my day so far has been emotionally and physically excruciating, but I want to appreciate [personal profile] spatch for listening to me speculate this morning on the subject of whether Voyager's Doctor is Jewish. Obviously the question itself presumes some biographical facts on the part of his creator-template, but I feel the odds are better than not in the case of an AI designer named Lewis Zimmerman who does most of his communicating via sarcasm: "Congratulations. The first trans-galactic phone call." So how does patrilineal descent work when it's photons? Fortunately, since I do not have the space in my life to explore the argument seriously, I am confident the answer is covered by either golem minhag or the same kind of fannishness that runs with the halachah of descent from Magneto. I did check rabbinical opinions on the Jewishness of robots and was entertained that professional-type people also think of Star Trek and whether a golem counts in a minyan. Personally I think that in the era of Zoom shivas and services, a sentient hologram would at least know how to dial in on time. Did this train of thought cross my mind in time to exploit it for Purimgifts? Nope. But it's one of the few things I did with my brain today that didn't make me miserable. And a package from [personal profile] minoanmiss arrived for my niece, who I will be seeing tomorrow. And that's really nice.
julian: Picture of the sign for Julian Street. (Default)

[personal profile] julian 2021-02-09 06:50 pm (UTC)(link)
You're entirely welcome. (I like working from the assumption a conversation is happening, not a series of corrections. That sometimes works out better than others.)

And -- Hah. Yes. My relationship with Judaism and both its orthopraxy and its orthodoxy is (obviously) *way* different than yours, and like, what's antagonistic-but-participatory from you would be a very different thing coming from me, and I don't have the history you do with your co-religionists, etc etc etc.