The Antisocial Socialist

For me, religion as a whole has an interesting -- and rather badly mangled -- place in the B5 universe. Remember the episode when everyone was showcasing their respective faiths? And oh-so-wisely, Sinclair lines up the huge range of religious representatives? Simultaneously highlighting just how two-dimensional all the other races in the series are? Not one of the other ambassadors thought to even mention that their world has more than a single religion.

As for the rabbi in TKO... What threw me was the language. He's quite the polyglot, using terms from Russian, Yiddish, *and* Hebrew. Yet he calls Susan "Suzochka," a dimunitive that makes no sense to me. It's like the whole "Vor" prefix that Bujold uses in her Miles Vorkosigan series. It works great until she pulls out a classical Russian last name -- where that isn't a prefix at all, but part of the root word.

The bit about kashrut, yeah. That was a distinctly weird handling. Irrespective of anything else, there was no way that fish could've been kosher, since it wasn't prepared in a kosher kitchen. But let's suppose that this issue has been relaxed, some two centuries from now. Has the question of scales on seafood also been dismissed as no longer relevant for modern Judaism? Those are the two primary requirements for seafood, if memory serves.

A further question would be, how does Judaism view bodies of water on other planets in the first place: Are they, and the completely independent evolutionary paths their inhabitants have taken, bound by the same rules as earth-born creatures? What about the position that since these creatures were not created as companions/food for humans, the laws of kashrut should not apply at all? I can see huge conflict between an orthodox view that non-earth food falls under a blanker prohibition and a reform/spacefaring practical position that... And here we would have to get into a lot of specifics based on how weird the food in question was :)