In 2011, the comedy website CollegeHumor, today known as Dropout, released a hilarious skit online that indicated a common thread between devoutly religious people and nerds.
The argument made, in a very tongue-in-cheek manner, was that a nerd is someone passionately obsessed with something, be it a religious text or a board game.
Anyone who has seen an excited student of a yeshiva, seminary, or rabbinic ordination program gush over his special interest in a religious text or debate can no doubt relate to this observation. But the overlap between the realms of geekdom and religiosity can manifest in other ways.
That is where tabletop games come in. Not only are they a popular hobby around the world, but many a religious Jew has also learned to embrace board games on a Shabbat afternoon. This topic is not exclusive to board games but also includes role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons.
And at the recent Roll for Destiny exhibition at the Schechter Gallery in Tel Aviv, this overlap was taken far past its natural conclusion and into outright experimental art.
Six games, each one made by a team of designers and artists, conveyed and explored unique and specific Jewish themes.
“I feel that the history of role-playing games is so much connected to our use of imagination,” curator Bar Yerushalmi told the Magazine. “It’s the most open-ended type of game. It’s amazing how little it requires and how much responsibility you have as a player or like what we call a Dungeon Master.”
'Just how deep board games can go'
The simplicity in Yerushalmi’s description can be a bit deceptive. If your only experience with board games is something simple like Monopoly or Settlers of Catan, then you may not be aware of just how deep board games can go. Many games can have a vast number of various components with extremely complicated rules. Simply setting up a game can be a monumental effort in itself, as is finding enough players to actually play the game.
With role-playing games (RPGs), the complexity can be compounded even further. While they may require much less in the way of setup, the rules often are indistinguishable from the games themselves. Instead of instruction pamphlets, many RPGs will have an entire book describing the rules. The bigger ones have several massive books each, as well as entire online databases and resources.
But it is precisely this quality of the medium that allows for many games to express unique identities and themes. And that is exactly what happened here.
“We’re facing the question of how RPGs are connected to art-making and how all of this is connected to the Jewish body of knowledge,” Yerushalmi explained.
“A group of 12 artists from different disciplines were divided into subgroups, and each team worked on a different game while researching parts of our Jewish or collective Israeli identity through a gaming methodology. It was kind of like questioning our collective self.”
This introspection was key to the project.
“I think the premise of the whole project comes from the fact that we’re in a very dark moment of our history, where what I call the muscle of imagination is being unused or is used by external forces of fear and racism and war,” the curator said. “This project is to redevelop the – let’s call it the gym for the imagination – and allow creators to expand into speculative narratives of what Judaism can be, what our present time can be, how can we imagine our future or past in a new way, kind of like an injection of imagination to the world.”
These themes show in some of the games. The developed projects include Carry On, a game about a security check at the airport – an experience familiar to Israelis and tourists alike.
The Days of the Messiah focuses on the Jewish interpretation of the Messiah and what is actually important. In this game, the Messiah is only on Earth for a limited time, and the players, who each represent a different part of the Messiah’s personality, must decide what their goal is while they are here.
“It’s a whole debate about what’s important and what’s not,” Yerushalmi said. “Maybe the Messiah wants, I don’t know, that avocados will be ready in any month of the year, or that there will be no traffic, or even bigger things like peace in the Middle East. But then they [the players] don’t only have to decide the objective; they also need to decide how they’re going to do it.”
EnGolement is a LARP (live-action role-playing game) that has players explore the concept of language while taking on the roles of golems in a shtetl.
Koreh Ha’dorot presents a setting where humanity has left Earth, and Jewishkind is stuck aboard a ship called The Tree of Life, where it must interpret and edit Jewish texts for the future.
“So it’s basically like an exercise in writing a new Talmud, where there is a voting system of how you change the text and how you give interpretations to it,” Yerushalmi said. “And you basically create a fictional Talmud paper around text that can be from different research.”
And then there was Chariot of Fire, a more classic RPG where players play as spaceships run by Kabbalistic sephirot in the far future, when the Jewish people has been sent on a third exile. But the focus of the game is research into what exactly happened.
“Why are we in galut? What happened to the Earth and why?” Yerushalmi offered as examples of things players could explore. “And wait, what happened to the Fourth Temple, and why did it get ruined? Yes, there was a Fourth Temple. Now you also have to wonder what happened to the Third.”
And then there was Pardes, the game we had to play.
When we were invited to go to the event to play one of these games, we were told not to come alone. We had to put together a team, a squad of four players – ourselves included – familiar with the concept of RPGs. After assembling our crew, we all gathered at the Schechter Gallery to play.
The game saw each of us positioned at corners of the board, while one of the game’s designers served as our guide on this storytelling journey. We each told a personal story based on one of the cards we received, and, with prompts, we continued to explore and expound on the meanings of these stories, providing deeper interpretations.
One player told the story of how he forgot how to ride a bike, relearned it, fell off a cliff, forgot how to ride a bike again, relearned again, and then fell off that same cliff a year later, only to then forget how to ride a bike once more.
A simple yet comedic story full of schadenfreude for the other players, to be sure; but exploring it with the mechanics of Pardes allowed him to look at it through new angles and find new meaning in it. How did he fall off the cliff both times? How did it affect his ability to try things again? Does it reflect stubbornness? An inability to retain information?
And at the same time, the other players got to learn more about him by analyzing this story. And the same was true for all of us.
We each left the table enjoying our experience and hoping the game’s creator would one day make a version for home purchase.
But the way we were all able to interact with the game very much resonated with the aim of the exhibition overall, which fits very well into the Schechter Gallery’s goal of being different from other galleries.
“You won’t find sculptures and paintings here. You’ll find experiences and engagement,” Yerushalmi said.
“I think a lot about participation these days. And I feel we have a very passive way of interacting with culture. We go to see plays or exhibitions. But games are amazing because you experience culture by embedding within it, from being yourself, pretending, playing, imagining. I find [game-playing] a very powerful tool, especially for nowadays when we have lost the ability to be children and use our imagination.”
These pages are dedicated to Baruch Singer, father of one of our players and longtime lover of games, Judaism, and Israel, who passed away while this article was being prepared for publication.
Pardes: Four go in, how do they come out?
The start of the Pardes game had us each pick a card at random, each one bearing a name and an image. The illustrations were twisted, almost psychedelic shapes, crumbling into recognizable and unrecognizable forms. The names on the cards were references to important concepts in Jewish mysticism – the Rainbow in the Clouds, the Snakes, the Red Thread.
Once we each had our card, we placed them at the four corners of an enormous wooden board, divided into a grid. We then each had to tell a story from our lives, loosely inspired by the image on our card.
The game’s name, Pardes, references a famous story of Jewish mysticism: Four rabbis entered a pardes (“orchard”). One died, one went mad, one came out intact, and one became a heretic. We, too, we were told, would enter the pardes. How would we emerge? The game would tell us.
Our stories varied in depth, tone, style, and content. There was humor, there was sadness, there was fear. We got to know one another quickly, through the stories – one of the aims of the game.
After each story had been told, we were presented with the first of four additional decks of cards. Each contained questions about our stories, which we would ask each other, drawing us deeper into the layers and meanings behind our tales, and drawing us further and further into the pardes.
The theme of the Roll for Destiny exhibition was how tabletop role-playing games could explore or interact with Jewish identity, and it was to my disappointment that this Pardes game failed on two accounts. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “role-playing” game. Our stories were told from our own perspectives, with room given for interpretation and exploration, but little of that imaginative improvisation or creative embellishment which is what draws me to proper TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games).
It also had little interaction with Jewish identity, except incidentally. While the theming of the cards and title was Jewish-related, the mechanics did little to press the angle, instead dropping off as little more than a bog-standard icebreaker storytelling game. As a whole, it was certainly interesting and enjoyable, passionately designed in a way that shown through in the creativity at play, but not at all what I was expecting going in.
In Jewish mysticism, pardes, meaning “orchard,” is often treated as an acronym: pshat, remez, drash, and sod. Each of the four decks that we drew questions from was labeled with one of these four concepts. Pshat, meaning “the straightforward reading of a text,” asked us simple questions about the world around us at the time of the story.
“What color was the sky?” One asked. “What did you see?” “What did you hear?” “Describe an element of the story in detail.”
The second deck, remez (“hint”), encouraged us to dive slightly deeper. “Describe the weather.” “Ask another player to tell your story.”
The third deck was drash (“seek”). These questions asked us more personal questions. “What does this story reveal about you?” “What does this story reveal about the world?”
Finally, we reached the core of the game, what we had been building up to: sod (“secret”). We each chose one last card, answered the question on it, and placed it in the center of the board. “What was the moral of your story?” “How does your story connect to someone else’s?” “Why is this story important?”
This was intended to be the emotional climax of the game, the resolution to all previous questions, granting us a final outcome of our venture into the pardes.
The game felt unpolished in places. Our Game Master admitted that he often ran with variant rules, switching elements of the game around in an attempt to maximize its potential with any given playgroup. For our group, he said, he went with a lighter form of the rules. Apparently, the full game has a stronger resolution and ending, which we did not get to experience.
The Jewish experience is one of stories, starting with the Bible, running on through centuries of history, told and retold at every holiday; stories of persecution, victories, desperation, and clinging survival.
On Passover, we spend hours telling the story of how we left Egypt, role-playing our exultation for the children. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, we listen to survivors tell stories of their time in the concentration camps. Pardes taps into that mentality, on a surface level, and tries to tie it to something deeper; but it ultimately remains a gossamer experience, insubstantial and fleeting.