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Dec. 18th, 2018 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferret(as usual there are spoilers here, because I am that asshole)
Lately on The Good Place, there's been a considerable focus on the afterlife's Point System, as famously mostly described by Doug Forcett. It's actually fairly simple, in its fashion. Everything you do is scored based on how objectively good or bad it is. Good things earn you points, bad things cost you points. If your score exceeds a certain threshold, you go to the Good Place; if not, you go to the Bad Place. If there is ambiguity, you go to the Medium Place.
It's actually a presentation of the afterlife that's fairly compatible with common Jewish traditions about the afterlife. There is considerable discussion in the Talmud of the relative merits earned for performing different mitzvot. There's no actual assigned point system. No Rabbi ever says "If you perform bikur cholim for the sick, you get ten points." There's an understanding that merits are contextual, and that a deed that might earn great merit for a particular person might earn little merit for another, because one had to overcome a greater yetzer hara to perform that mitzvah, or for a number of other reasons. Still, the image of God on Yom Kippur weighing our sins against our deeds on the great balance of Justice is a broadly Jewish one.
But on The Good Place in recent episodes it's become increasingly clear that the Points System is broken. Nobody has entered The Good Place, nobody has scored enough points to clear its threshold, in five centuries. Michael and Team Cockroach seem to be converging on the theory that the Bad Place has somehow co-opted the system to redirect deserving people their way, but this feels both unlikely narratively and unsatisfying thematically.
kass wrote in her post on Season 1, " Up until the day of one's death, Judaism teaches, one can make teshuvah / return to one's highest self. But this show goes further: it seems to be positing that even after the day of one's death, one can continue to change and grow and improve!"
She pinpoints here the major way in which the show's afterlife does not align with Jewish theology of the afterlife. It is a trope of Rabbinic literature to depict great sages, moral leaders of their communities and sources of great charity and righteousness on their death beds lamenting their inability to perform further mitzvot once they die. Lo Hametim yehallu ya, wrote King David. In Olam Hazeh, we perform acts that earn us a place in Olam Haba. In Olam Haba, we can no longer earn reward for performing mitzvot. The very idea of earning merit no longer will make sense in Olam Haba.
But clearly because of the design of Michael's Neighborhood, Eleanor and the rest of Team Cockroach are able to perform some sort of teshuva. They are able to become better people, to help those around them, to serve their community, in a way that one would not expect from a permanent afterlife. This was originally the reason Michael sought a meeting with Gen. This was the argument he thought would earn Team Cockroach a second chance at the Good Place. Somehow in the constant and mesmerizing plot twists of Seasons 2 and 3 that has drifted into the background. But it feels important to me. Somehow the impossibility of teshuva in Olam Haba and the fact that it's happening anyway has to be connected to the reason why nobody has gone to the Good Place, to the general brokenness of the system.
The brokenness of the system is the most unsettling part of the show. The Good Place has always been premised on the idea that there's a Big Guy who makes sure everything's working, but the deeper our heroes explore of the plumbing of the numinous realms, the less clear it is that the Big Guy has been active at all in keeping an eye on things, or even that there is a Big Guy at all.
Anyway, over the past week or so I caught up on a different fantasy about God and faith, the CBS drama God Friended Me, in which a mysterious computer account calling itself God, backed by uncrackable firewalls, sends facebook messages to our atheist hero, urging him to seek out strangers in New York City and presumably to help them out. It's like the beginning of The Good Place Season 3, if that show didn't have a total inability to commit to a premise and stick with it all the way to the end.
The Good Place is defiantly ironic; God Friended Me is painfully sincere. The Good Place is a show about four people pulled out of every context, every community they were ever a part of, and forced to look deeply at themselves in isolation to discover who they really are. God Friended Me is a show about who we are we we embed ourselves deeply in a community that is bigger than ourselves. It has a deft touch for showing how people in lonely, mortal New York City are linked together in deeper ways than they realize.
And God Friended Me is about Olam Hazeh, and the fact that living in this messy imperfect world of ours, with no Janets or Michaels or Seans, all we can do every day to create a space for ourselves in Eternity is to struggle to try to make our lives and the lives of the people around us better. You can call that God, you can call that Religion. God Friended Me is uncertain about that question, but it knows that we're all part of Team Cockroach and it knows that the Universe is rooting for us to survive.
Lately on The Good Place, there's been a considerable focus on the afterlife's Point System, as famously mostly described by Doug Forcett. It's actually fairly simple, in its fashion. Everything you do is scored based on how objectively good or bad it is. Good things earn you points, bad things cost you points. If your score exceeds a certain threshold, you go to the Good Place; if not, you go to the Bad Place. If there is ambiguity, you go to the Medium Place.
It's actually a presentation of the afterlife that's fairly compatible with common Jewish traditions about the afterlife. There is considerable discussion in the Talmud of the relative merits earned for performing different mitzvot. There's no actual assigned point system. No Rabbi ever says "If you perform bikur cholim for the sick, you get ten points." There's an understanding that merits are contextual, and that a deed that might earn great merit for a particular person might earn little merit for another, because one had to overcome a greater yetzer hara to perform that mitzvah, or for a number of other reasons. Still, the image of God on Yom Kippur weighing our sins against our deeds on the great balance of Justice is a broadly Jewish one.
But on The Good Place in recent episodes it's become increasingly clear that the Points System is broken. Nobody has entered The Good Place, nobody has scored enough points to clear its threshold, in five centuries. Michael and Team Cockroach seem to be converging on the theory that the Bad Place has somehow co-opted the system to redirect deserving people their way, but this feels both unlikely narratively and unsatisfying thematically.
kass wrote in her post on Season 1, " Up until the day of one's death, Judaism teaches, one can make teshuvah / return to one's highest self. But this show goes further: it seems to be positing that even after the day of one's death, one can continue to change and grow and improve!"She pinpoints here the major way in which the show's afterlife does not align with Jewish theology of the afterlife. It is a trope of Rabbinic literature to depict great sages, moral leaders of their communities and sources of great charity and righteousness on their death beds lamenting their inability to perform further mitzvot once they die. Lo Hametim yehallu ya, wrote King David. In Olam Hazeh, we perform acts that earn us a place in Olam Haba. In Olam Haba, we can no longer earn reward for performing mitzvot. The very idea of earning merit no longer will make sense in Olam Haba.
But clearly because of the design of Michael's Neighborhood, Eleanor and the rest of Team Cockroach are able to perform some sort of teshuva. They are able to become better people, to help those around them, to serve their community, in a way that one would not expect from a permanent afterlife. This was originally the reason Michael sought a meeting with Gen. This was the argument he thought would earn Team Cockroach a second chance at the Good Place. Somehow in the constant and mesmerizing plot twists of Seasons 2 and 3 that has drifted into the background. But it feels important to me. Somehow the impossibility of teshuva in Olam Haba and the fact that it's happening anyway has to be connected to the reason why nobody has gone to the Good Place, to the general brokenness of the system.
The brokenness of the system is the most unsettling part of the show. The Good Place has always been premised on the idea that there's a Big Guy who makes sure everything's working, but the deeper our heroes explore of the plumbing of the numinous realms, the less clear it is that the Big Guy has been active at all in keeping an eye on things, or even that there is a Big Guy at all.
Anyway, over the past week or so I caught up on a different fantasy about God and faith, the CBS drama God Friended Me, in which a mysterious computer account calling itself God, backed by uncrackable firewalls, sends facebook messages to our atheist hero, urging him to seek out strangers in New York City and presumably to help them out. It's like the beginning of The Good Place Season 3, if that show didn't have a total inability to commit to a premise and stick with it all the way to the end.
The Good Place is defiantly ironic; God Friended Me is painfully sincere. The Good Place is a show about four people pulled out of every context, every community they were ever a part of, and forced to look deeply at themselves in isolation to discover who they really are. God Friended Me is a show about who we are we we embed ourselves deeply in a community that is bigger than ourselves. It has a deft touch for showing how people in lonely, mortal New York City are linked together in deeper ways than they realize.
And God Friended Me is about Olam Hazeh, and the fact that living in this messy imperfect world of ours, with no Janets or Michaels or Seans, all we can do every day to create a space for ourselves in Eternity is to struggle to try to make our lives and the lives of the people around us better. You can call that God, you can call that Religion. God Friended Me is uncertain about that question, but it knows that we're all part of Team Cockroach and it knows that the Universe is rooting for us to survive.