Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(19)

By the end of City of Glass, Clary is ready for the impossible. With Amatis’ charge ringing in her ears, with the Clave ready to throw up its hands and give in to Valentine, with all hope apparently lost, Clary is done letting other people tell her what she can and cannot do. And after hundreds of pages of excuses, of there’s nothing I can do and the Law is the Law, finally, someone stands up to say there’s something I can do.

There’s a choice after all.

There’s always a choice.

This is the lesson our heroes need to embrace before they can grow up…and before they can triumph. To win, they need to do more than just question the rules. They need to change them. The runes of the past aren’t enough to win a battle against Valentine’s demon army, but if Clary and co. break the rules? If they write a new rune, and write it across the skin of every Shadowhunter, if they incite an entire society to buck the established order, if only for a single day, they just might prevail. It’s the key to defeating Valentine, but it’s also the key to their coming of age—to Alec embracing his identity, to Jace choosing his true family, to Clary discovering her inner warrior. Before any of that can happen, they need to reject the comfort they’ve found in following the rules and letting someone else call the shots. They need to understand their lives aren’t prescribed and predetermined, that things don’t need to work the way they always have, that the future is unwritten and belongs to them. No matter how terrifying, they need to decide that the only rules that matter are the ones they write themselves.



Robin Wasserman is the author of several books for children and young adults, including the Cold Awakening Trilogy, Hacking Harvard, and, most recently, The Book of Blood and Shadow. She lives and writes (and occasionally procrastinates) in Brooklyn. You can find more information about her and her books at www.robinwasserman.com.





MICHELLE HODKIN

When I read Michelle’s essay for the first time, I was stuck between wanting to dance around in delight and wanting to have a good sympathy cry. It was a complicated feeling, as you can see. She’s clearly done her research, and it shows in this detailed exploration of Simon’s two kinds of Otherness: being Jewish, and being a vampire. I feel I have no words that can do this essay justice, except to say that I’m so, so glad it was written.

I’ll end with a quote from below: “[Simon] demonstrates more than any other character in the Mortal Instruments that it is not our blood but our actions that define who we are.”

Sniff.


SIMON LEWIS: JEWISH, VAMPIRE, HERO

Riddle:

We have existed for centuries. Our days begin at night. We can’t eat what our neighbors eat. Who are we?

Answer:

If you guessed “Jews,” you would be right.

If you guessed “vampires,” you would also be right.

And if you guessed “Jewish vampires,” you would be thinking of Simon Lewis.





Jews and Vampires as “Other”


Historically, the Jewish people are culturally “Other,” a minority that has existed for centuries despite plenty of persecution and comprising less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population. We are a nomadic people, in exile from the Jewish homeland since before the common era. But despite our long history of persecution, despite our tiny numbers, despite the fact that those numbers are spread all over the world in the Diaspora (more literally translated as exile)—despite all of this, the Jewish people have remained virtually unchanged for millennia. Jews still eat matzo, unleavened bread, on Passover in Bangkok and Tel Aviv. On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, a ram’s horn, the shofar, is still blown in synagogues in Fiji and Finland. The Jewish people have fasted on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, since before Christianity existed. Civilizations rise and fall, but the Jewish people still exist, a wandering nation among nations. The world may change, but we remain.

As a people, Jews have cultural, religious, and behavioral restrictions, obligations, codes, and standards of conduct that set us apart from the rest of the world. The Torah and Talmud codify laws that govern every moment of a Jewish person’s day throughout every stage of life, from morning until night, from birth until death. Our days begin and end at sundown; the Sabbath, for example, begins at sundown on Friday night and continues until sundown on Saturday night—not Sunday. And perhaps most famously, we are prohibited from eating foods that aren’t kosher, including a litany of foods recounted in Leviticus. Pork and shellfish are the most well known of those foods, but we’re also forbidden from consuming blood, whether it comes from a kosher animal or not. When a kosher animal, such as a cow, is slaughtered according to Jewish law, the meat must be drained of blood through the liberal application of salt so that we don’t ingest a single drop. According to Leviticus 17:10:

And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among them, that eateth any manner of blood, I will set My face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.

And yet we have been accused throughout history of drinking human blood. The first instances of blood libel leveled against the Jewish people were recorded in the eleventh century and were immortalized in a ballad depicting the ritual murder of the child Hugh of England in 1255.1 In the Middle Ages, not practicing Christianity was thought to be evidence of devil worship, and attempts were made to wipe out entire Jewish communities. Accusing us of drinking the blood of Christian children was a surefire, inflammatory way of prejudicing non-Jewish neighbors against us. Rumors also grew that Jews could reanimate after death, so naturally Jewish corpses were burned or decapitated and staked for good measure.