Your comment on the post about multiple fandom readings - which I agree with! - made me smile, because it feels like a very Jewish response. When books of the holiest texts come with a bunch of mutually contradictory takes in the commentary right underneath, a tendency to allow or even value different interpretations seems pretty likely. Of course I'm still attached to my own readings, sometimes emotionally so, but others can shed light on them, you know?
I didn’t even think about it this way, but you’re right--it’s so bizarre to me when people can’t wrap their head around the idea of the same text being taken multiple ways by multiple people. How do you even live without the idea of midrash? I always thought it was so weird in college when people in my lit classes would be like, “But what is it SUPPOSED to mean?” genuinely wanting Word of God type clarification, when honestly, I don’t ever want that! I’m very sola scriptura about my text interpretation, most of the time.
I can only assume being so used to the idea that people can take the literal words of God, and be like, “No no this is what it means” “no, THIS is what it means” and they can both be right and both be wrong. It’s kind of similar to another thing I love about Judaism, that things are the Tanach are TRUE, even if they aren’t strictly FACTUAL. I was never taught that Jonah was like, a literal man getting swallowed by a literal fish, but I was taught that the story is TRUE. As an adult, I think the story is about our relationship with God, how we cannot sometimes avoid being the person we are meant to be, how our role in the tapestry of the universe is more important than our individual desires.
The things we live our lives by, whether they be religious texts or stories or whatever, are as much personal to us as they are anything else, and I think it’s so important to realize that our window to the world informs our view, and looking out of other windows has immense value.
And I too, get SUPER WRAPPED UP in my own readings, in Torah, in fiction, in TV, whatever, but I guess I’m just used enough to sitting in Torah study listening to someone else’s reading and going, “I mean, okay, I guess” and having them do the same, that even the idea of fanon being taken as gospel offends me on some base level. I can LEARN something from someone else’s reading, even if I don’t like. I can have an emotional response to something without that emotional response being a sign of my ineffable correctness.
let me add, I am NOT perfect, either, in any way. When I first got onto tumblr I too drank the Social Righteousness juice and found myself using good ideals--inclusivity, diversity, representation, anti-racism, etc--as fucking bludgeons. I was verbally clever, so using those things I could make myself “right”. But when I searched my motivations, what were they really? Was I seeking to improve the world? Or was I seeking for my way of seeing, you know, a fictional fucking character, to be the ‘correct and morally upright’ one? It’s embarrassing and so easy to fall into and I’m glad I grew up a bit. Once I came to, I was pretty deeply ashamed, since I fucking know better, and it quickly becomes Cry Wolf.
anyway sorry this became rambling, but YES! I think being Jewish greatly informs the way I look at the text, and the conversation around the text, and why I am sometimes shit-shocked that we can’t just have...conversations...about readings and interpretations.