Vic Fontaine

I have a confession. 

While this blog is vaguely Star Wars-themed, the truth is . . . I'm a Trekkie. 

Luke raised me on The Next Generation, and watching the Picard, Season 3, reboot, I nearly cried seeing the beloved characters of my childhood. Especially Worf. He's my favorite. 

Yet Luke was not so passionate about the other iterations, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, so I never watched those through properly. I've been rectifying that error now, finally getting through the last few episodes of Season 7 of DS9. 

I've been pleasantly surprised at how excellent this series is. The first few seasons could be eye-rollingly cheesy, but then it morphed into an absolutely brilliant show, complete with episodes that had me sniffling. They pushed the TNG envelope, and pulled it off. 

There was a line from one episode that I thought about. 

A character in the show is injured in combat. He's young, an ensign, and this experience rattles him. There is a program in the holosuite which has a self-aware holographic character, Vic Fontaine, and he ends up becoming a central player in a number of episodes. Vic owns a casino in Vegas in 1962.

So the ensign loses himself in this program, refusing to leave, enjoying the safety of the fantasy. Vic even enjoys the company, but at some point realizes that this isn't healthy, and tells the ensign he has to leave. 

The ensign explains that he's not ready to face reality again. Vic tells him: 

Look, kid, I don't know what's going to happen to you out there. All I can tell you is that... you've got to play the cards life deals you. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But at least you're in the game.

It made me think of how our religion says that being living is the ideal, that we can do, that life is always the best option. Life may be disappointing at times, or worse, but at least we're in the game. 

Inherent Value

NYTimes featured a rather long article about Greta Gerwig and her Barbie movie. In the very end of the piece, there's this bit from out of nowhere: 

She told me that when she was growing up, her Christian family's closet friends were observant Jews; they vacationed together and constantly tore around each other's homes. She would also eat with them on Friday nights for Shabbat dinner, where blessings were sung in Hebrew, including over the children at the table. May God bless you and protect you. May God show you favor and be gracious to you. May God show you kindness and grant you peace. Every Friday the family's father would rest his hand on Gerwig's head, just as he did on his own children's, and bless her too. 

"I remember this feeling the sense of, 'Whatever your wins and losses were for the week, whatever you did or didn't do, when you come to this table, your value has nothing to do with that,'" Gerwig told me. "'You are a child of God at this table. And that's your value.' I remember feeling so safe in that and feeling so, like, enough." 

Sometimes we need the perspective of an outsider to make us see the values of our own world. 

This bracha I would usually associate with pomp and circumstance, when the kohanim would seriously remove their shoes and hide themselves beneath their talleisim. 

Yet that same bracha is accessible to the common man, for any father, outside of the priestly class, to bless his children. For me, the Sabbath Blessing in Fiddler on the Roof always sends me bawling; I would sing it to Ben as a baby (he finally realized I can't sing and he doesn't let me anymore). 

 

There is this pressure on us to do, to achieve, to accomplish. Yet we can't always sustain that. Sometimes our victories don't look like much of a victory. 

But it doesn't matter. Because the world was created for each and every one of us, as we are. For as a parent loves their child unconditionally, so to God loves us.