Hi friends! First of all, thank you for your patience with this Substack. I have been having a hard time keeping it up to date because of some frustrations with the Substack site itself. Some of these have been addressed (they finally added a date picker instead of month/day/year hour/minute dropdowns), but many remain (managing any number of drafts is nearly impossible due to how they’re listed, you can only schedule 90 days in advance). Either way, I forgot that I ran out of scheduled posts a bit ago and that I needed to schedule the next batch. I’ll be scheduling those soon.
Needless to say, I’m still about! The Mitzvot launch went swimmingly and folks who have read it seem to have enjoyed it. I’ve been keeping up on the advertising on socials in what I hope are fun ways. A recent example was posting a whole thing about the Post-Self series with a bit of humor and such. I posted it both on cohost and on Tumblr. The benefit to cohost was finding a community there that seems earnestly interested and happy to rechost neat things that people make, while the benefit to Tumblr is the ability to Blaze a post. For $65, they’ll boost a post until it gets 20k interactions, which is nooot bad at all.
Another benefit, though, is the ability to receive questions and answer them in a public way. Someone who found my post through the Blaze campaign had a really interesting question and, while I started answering it straight out, my response quickly veered catastrophically Maddy. I figured I’d go ahead and post that here on Substack, but you can read the original response here.
hello! i saw your blazed post about your book, and it looks really interesting! i hope you don't mind questions, because i have something i'm curious about.
i noticed the books in your tetralogy have Hebrew titles. i think that's really cool! when i read the descriptions though i didn't see reference to that anywhere. if you don't mind answering, what's the significance of the titles?
i plan on reading the books regardless of your answer (as in right after i send this ask), but i'm always intrigued (as a Jew myself) when i see stuff like this. thank you for reading my message and for making such a cool story!
Hey, thanks so much for the ask! I guess there's a few layers to this, which I'll answer as unspoilingly as possible. And, since it'll be posted publicly, I'll go a bit into the words for other folks reading, too.
The core reason for this comes from a central character, Michelle Hadje, who was "raised vaguely Jewish" (her words, it's complicated :P) then, to varying degrees, drifted closer to those roots over the years. While this isn't often directly plot-relevant, it nevertheless informs the entirety of her and her clade (a group of copies or 'forks' of her who have long since individuated).
The base significance for each title is as follows:
Qoheleth - There's a character who goes by Qoheleth, which is an Anglicization of the Hebrew word kohelet. The word refers to a teacher or a gatherer of the assembled, and is the title of the book in the Tanakh of the same name, also known as Ecclesiastes. It's an older Anglicization (and is combined 'Hebel', an older Anglicization of the Hebrew havél, meaning breath or, in context, meaningless or vanity). The reason he's chosen this name is plot relevant, so I'll stop there. Needless to say, ideas of wisdom versus folly are woven throughout.
Toledot - The Hebrew word toledot refers to generations, lineage, or inheritance. You can think of it as the 'begats'; it's the list of generations and lineages in Genesis 25-28. The book takes place over two time periods (2124 and 2325), involving the changes that Michelle's clade goes through to become who they are. Additionally, one of their distant cousins outside of the system is a character who, despite having never met Michelle, is obsessed with her past. Finally, there is a brief discussion of a very historically fraught document called the Toledot Yeshu — the generations of Jesus — and a particular interpretation of one of the sentences.
Nevi'im - This title refers to prophets. It's the 'na' in Tanakh (Torah, Nevi'im, Ketuvim, the three sections of the Hebrew bible). This one is probably the most bound up in plot, so all I'll really be able to say is that some events happen surrounding a new group of characters that herald a change both for society and for the the clade at the center of all of this.
Mitzvot - I'll admit, this was a working title that just kind of stuck in the end. It initially was based off a one-off comment from a character ("As you intentionally moved towards feeling, I worked to contain and compartmentalize it within myself after you came into being. I became a being of negative commandments. I lived the 'shalt not's while you performed your mitzvot of loving and caring."). While I'd always meant to change it, it wound up growing on me. This refers to commandments, yes, but also the actions one takes to fulfill those commandments — it's the plural of mitzvah, so if you've heard something like "you've done a mitzvah", that's where that comes from. It stuck around as a title since a theme in the story is just how one defines oneself through one's actions.
Now for the "why" part, and the part that makes me very anxious about all of this. It's intensely personal, and maybe not even that interesting, and I worry that it will come off as insulting or appropriative. Feel free to skip, though. It's long and wandery.
The most abstract layer to all of this is that I think the greatest utility writing for the author is as a tool of self-exploration. It's an excuse to do a lot of research into something one's interested in, sure, but that interest comes from somewhere.
I'll be up front and say that I'm not Jewish, and I'll also be honest and say that this is a very confusing and tender part of my life.
I'm a Quaker, and I suppose I'm pretty happy with that! I get to be surrounded by a bunch of leftists who are both politically and spiritually active. My life has a built-in contemplative aspect that, combined with the community aspect, allows for a lot of introspection that was inaccessible (or at least discouraged) in a lot of my early life.
There is, however, a universe not too dissimilar from this one where I converted to Judaism. That may yet be this universe, even. Every time I think about why, though, I realize I don't know. I don't know! I've spent decade thinking about it now, and, while I've learned a ton about both myself and Judaism, I sometimes feel no closer to an understanding of my relationship to it.
The only times I do feel like I'm coming closer are when I'm writing. It's not the first time I've used writing for discernment; I have a novella that investigates a Catholic point of view which led to me veering further from that particular lived experience.
The Post-Self tetralogy was an outlet for researching Judaism, yes, but it's also an outlet for introspection and interrogation of the self. It's not even the only project that does such: a third of my MFA thesis is a braided essay, with one strand being what amounts to an exegesis of the book of Job with the thesis that, after the events of the book, he had a choice to head either in the direction of the author of Kohelet, building wisdom, or in the direction of Jonah, harboring that anger in an attempt to shield himself from his own fear.
The other strand, though, is about my own choice after an event early in the exploration into gender that led to me transitioning. From that point, I could have bundled myself up in cynicism and stayed stubbornly masculine, resenting my life and myself in order to cushion myself from those rough edges of fear, hoping only that that anger would be less likely tear up me up from the inside. I wound up choosing the other option, though, passing through the death of Matthew and the birth of Madison.
I bring this up specifically to tie back to something I said all the way back in the second paragraph: even though I wasn't raised vaguely Jewish as Michelle was, it nonetheless informs several aspects of my life. I'm not Job. I'm not Kohelet. It's just that I was presented with my own choice of Job and chose to head in what I hope is the direction towards wisdom, away from fear.
I suppose we all must be confronted with these choices at some point in our lives, and through writing-as-discernment, I guess I'm trying to untangle if the reason this isn't the universe where I converted is because, at some point in the past, I chose some other direction at some other inflection point.
This is probably more answer than you were specifically looking for, but I strive to be earnest and accountable for my actions. I do hope that you enjoy the books, even in all of their imperfections, even if you disregard this bit of introspection. I hope they stand on their own even if only as works of curiosity and queer lives in some more hopeful world.
Thanks again for asking and getting me to think through this and put into words what I've been feeling on some deeper level.
Addenda:
To be clear, 'mitzvot' refers to all 613 commandments, not just the ten that I'm sure leap to mind given that word.
I chose Toledot for the title of book 2 before I knew some of the history behind how the Toledot Yeshu was used by Christians against Jews, and while I stand by the point that's made in the book by Dear and Yared, I probably could have handled it better. Nevertheless, as the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible say of Job, it is "part of the book we now have." When I read things I wrote and find things I dislike about it, it is perhaps a sign that I've become a better writer since.
Really interesting introspection here, and I definitely vibe with the writing-as-discernment phrase. I love it when creatives of any type explain the origin of their ideas and what draws them to create. It's refreshing! And magical!