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.

The Sephiroth in Kabbalah.

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 and Jenova, from Final Fantasy VII

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.