Sephiroth and Me: Playing Final Fantasy VII As A Jewish Person
Writer’s Note 11/8/2023: This article is firmly about Final Fantasy VII, its connections to Judaism, and my personal journey with both those things as a Jewish person. It is not about Zionism. Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing. Do not conflate and associate my words here with the violence of Zionism and the apartheid state of Israel.
As a kid, I had no stable connection to my Jewishness except my last name and infrequent visits to my aunt and uncle’s house for Rosh Hashanah. We barely did Passover, I didn’t understand a lick of Hebrew, but my goy mother still brought out the Lenox menorah and made latkes using the recipe from the temple community cookbook for Hanukkah.
I went through public school in a town that was predominantly white and Christian where I was one of five Jewish kids in my graduating class. I was Jewish by last name and ethnicity, not in faith, and yet I had pennies being thrown at me, I was told to bake myself in an oven, and I was the subject of pitying looks during every Holocaust unit. I was an appointed spokesperson of the Jewish struggle for goyim to place their misguided empathy. I was a bagel-eating Jew in every aspect but the nagging anti-semitism by my peers all due to my last name and big nose never stopped.
Instead of having a bat mitzvah, my cousin gave me his original copy of Final Fantasy VII. I didn’t go to Hebrew school, I didn’t go to temple, and I didn’t read any part of the Torah.
But I had Final Fantasy VII.
Arguably, Final Fantasy VII is Square Enix’s magnum opus (this is definitely a personal opinion and entirely biased) and it proved to be my own personal Torah, the thing that guided my relationship with Judaism better than the actual text of the religion a significant part of my identity is intertwined with.
Not only was Final Fantasy my Torah but Sephiroth, known video game villain and icon, became the fictional personification of my relationship with Judaism.
Unless you happen to be Jewish or have a deep interest in religious studies, particularly of the Abrahamic variety, Final Fantasy VII’s ties to Judaism would completely fly over your head. It certainly flew over my head until recently.
On the surface level, the largest connection between Judaism and Final Fantasy VII is the play on words between sefirot and Sephiroth, the main antagonist of the game. One could very easily shrug it off as the writers thinking sefirot was a cool word and changing it a little bit to Sephiroth, but it’s much more than that. Naming the main antagonist of the game after a facet of Judaism is a bold move, one that could be seen as tasteless given its equivocation of something Jewish with something evil. I don’t think this is the case at all. Naming the character ‘Sephiroth’ reveals Judaism’s true impact on the plot of Final Fantasy VII.
The opposing omnipresent qualities of The Lifestream and Jenova are essentially parallel to how Kabbalah, a facet of Judaism, is interpreted by Jewish people. The Lifestream and Jenova function as the ‘Ein Sof’ of Final Fantasy VII — a term for what God was before he had any sort of physical manifestation within Kabbalah literature. Jenova enacts her will through Sephiroth, similar to how Ein Sof is enacted through the Sefirots. The Lifestream is the more positive interpretation of Kabbalah while Jenova is the negative interpretation.
Kabbalah is part of the ancient Jewish tradition and it existed before Moses received the Torah. It’s often referred to as the Torah’s soul or backbone. It is composed of ten different Sefirots (types of attributes of Ein Sof) each representing one of the ten ways God reveals his will and wisdom to humans.
There are mountains of religious studies and scholarship done on Kabbalah, both its history and the understanding of it, but put simply, it is the way God reveals himself to humankind. It provides a framework to understand the universe and to understand one’s place within it
Commonly, God in the Kabbalah is referred to as ‘Ein Sof’ or ‘The Infinite.’ Ein Sof is what God was, before God was God. According to Kabbalah, everyone has a bit of Ein Sof within them, like a spark. It’s representative of the symbiotic relationship between humans, the soul, and the divine. When one dies, their spark of Ein Sof will return back to the larger Infinite.
Of course there are Jewish people who don’t prescribe to Kabbalah, and see it as a less than ideal way of approaching Judaism. It can be seen as polytheistic, rather than monotheistic, given how Ein Sof is divided into ten different Sefirots. This is a pretty big no-no, since Judaism is about strict monotheism. Some non-Kabbalists believe that Ein Sof functions more like a trickster-god, something that was falsely told it was God by a mother-like figure.
The Lifestream, the liquid energy running through Gaia, is the source of life in the world of Final Fantasy VII. It contains the memories, emotions, and knowledge of everyone who has ever lived on The Planet. This is similar to how Ein Sof is perceived as the font of God’s knowledge, wisdom, health, and wellness that is revealed to humanity. When someone dies, their essence returns back to The Lifestream, and when one dies according to the Kabbalah, their ‘spark’ of Ein Sof returns back to the Ein Sof.
Jenova (likely a play on one of the Hebrew names for God, Jehovah, and the other main antagonist of the game) the extra-terrestrial being used by the Shinra Company, is utilized to find The Promised Land, a place holding Mako deposits of which predatory megacorporation Shinra sources to power their electricity plants. To do this, Jenova’s cells were implanted in humans to create someone who could find this Promised Land. These superhumans later become members of Shinra’s military force, SOLDIER.
Sephiroth was the strongest and most successful member of SOLDIER, a larger-than-life figurehead that newcomers looked up to. He was content with his ranking within the organization, he was stoic but wasn’t malicious. Despite all that, he was still a byproduct of Hojo’s experiments, an integral part of Jenova Project. He had been injected with the Jenova cells like other members of SOLDIER, but he discovered the truth of the matter unlike others.
He comes to view Jenova as his mother, going so far as to explicitly refer to her as such. In this case, Jenova works as the trickster-god mother figure associated with Kabbalah.
Before his complete descent into madness marked by the Nibelheim Incident — the destruction of the Cloud and Tifa’s hometown of Nibelheim at the hands of Sephiroth — he goes through an internal struggle regarding the revelation of his birth. He attempts to live in this limbo of either complacency or resentment, ultimately choosing the path of resentment, with which he believes to be destiny and leads to the events of Final Fantasy VII.
I referred to Final Fantasy VII as my Torah. The only reason I bothered to look up anything having to do with Jewish philosophy and theological study is because of Final Fantasy VII. I just wanted to understand my favorite game better and ended up with a religious identity crisis.
I’ve existed in limbo for a long time. I’ve been in pre-Nibelheim limbo, just without the want to eradicate an entire village. I’ve questioned it for just as long. I’m Jewish enough to be on the receiving end of anti-semitism but I’m not Jewish enough for other Jews. I’m not mitzvah-ed and my mother isn’t Jewish, so then where does that leave me?
Is my relationship with Judaism align more with The Lifestream, am I a part of something larger than me? Whether that be the collective Jewish experience, the Jewish diaspora, or something more in terms of the divine? Or does it align more with Jenova? Is it something that I should be resentful towards? Something to be ashamed of?
I’ve long struggled with the shame I associated with being Jewish so much so that I desired to be less Jewish. I didn’t want this last name, I didn’t want to do Hanukkah, I didn’t want to know any Hebrew.
Only when I got to college did I want to have a proper understanding of what it meant to be Jewish. It took me getting out of the public school system I’d been in my entire life and seeking out Jewish family members I cut ties with (not because of the Jewish stuff, but for different reasons). For once, I wanted to be proud of my Jewishness and it started with educating myself.
At the end of the day, I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in the teachings of Judaism. I like that Judaism encourages people to have a dynamic relationship with their fate and that they’re a part of something larger. This dynamic relationship allows for less blind following of faith, because to me to be religious is to be engaged. The believer is meant to have an active relationship with their faith.
I think it’s important to question and have an open dialogue. I think it’s important to be educated and to educate others. I think it’s important to realize your actions always impact others and to be mindful of what kind of impact you make.
Out of everything, Final Fantasy VII gave me the tools to work through all of that.
Ria Teitelbaum is a queer Jewish writer and video game enthusiast with a lot to say. She also co-hosts a Homestuck re-read podcast over at Homestuck At Space Camp and all her hot takes can be found @ria_tee.
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