“It’s a gamer novel, basically,” my friend said from the other side of the couch, looking up from her copy of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. She had hardly stopped reading long enough to eat, unable to tear her eyes from the pages. I was dying to know more about the book that had seized her attention. Not being a gamer, I was disappointed by this summary. But when she finished the book a day later, she thrust it into my hands. “This book will wreck you,” she said, “You need to read it. Trust me.”
A week later, I found myself laying on my stomach for an entire Shabbat, laughing and gasping and dripping tears into Gabrielle Zevin’s so-called gamer novel.
The story follows two friends, Sam and Sadie, from childhood to adulthood as they play, create games, and start a company together. Over thirty years, the two navigate love, loss, identity, disability, work, the creative process, and more. Sam and Sadie initially meet and bond through gaming together in a hospital. Following a traumatic car accident, Sam refuses to speak to anyone for months, but begins to speak again with Sadie. From childhood, the two understand each other in a way that no one else does.
“This may be the best book I’ve ever read,” I told my family when Shabbat ended. “Why?” my mother asked, taken aback by my hyperbole. While Zevin’s writing is brilliant and her characters nuanced, I found it difficult to put words to what had touched me so intensely. What made Tomorrow feel so special, so unique? I opened my laptop, desperate to discover what other readers thought.
Life imitates art
Zevin touched on so many important topics that the reviews were diverse. Some reviewers focused on Zevin’s identity as a Jewish and Korean American author, and the way she deftly portrays her characters navigating similar identities. Others emphasize the incredible way she describes game creation as literary and full of empathy and adds nuance to a conversation on cultural appropriation. But I noticed something odd: each review took care to mention, as if it were the strangest thing, that Sam and Sadie were never romantic or sexual partners. The tone of these disclaimers ranged from distant to disappointed. The Guardian review even mentions that this story is “never a romance,” but the article still belies a preference for heteronormative romantic storylines. “When game boy meets game girl,” the article’s headline blurts, “Video games unite a young creative couple.”
These attention-grabbing distortions are not just inaccurate, they are the very assumptions that Zevin’s novel works to dismantle. My frustration bubbled to the surface: wasn’t this her point? That Sam and Sadie’s relationship is constantly misinterpreted by a society that refuses to view friendship (especially between a man and a woman) with equal weight to romantic partnerships, or at the very least as real and valuable? My face was hot, anger swirling in my stomach. Slamming my laptop shut, I realized just why this novel was so groundbreaking.
With Sam’s disability comes many hospital visits, Sadie by his side. As a friend, she is not permitted to enter his hospital room past visiting hours. They eventually come up with a solution to this problem: “When the nurse asked Sam who Sadie was, Sam answered quickly, ‘My wife.’” In these moments, the characters are struck by the fact that the word “friend” feels devastatingly insufficient to encapsulate their relationship, bearing little weight in such dire situations. Since the word is used so much, Sadie thinks, it has nearly lost its meaning. This struggle to define their relationship recurs throughout the story, as family members, friends and the general public continue to misconstrue the nature of their connection.
This experience is viscerally familiar. My best friend and I are constantly mistaken for a couple. Our friendship is steeped with affection and mutual admiration, but has never been romantic (at least, not in the way that society defines romance). When others see our chemistry, the way we uplift each other and inspire each others’ creativity, they are shocked to learn that we are just friends. He is the one who sits by my side in the hospital and holds my hand while I sob. He is the one I call to see if my writing makes sense. “Nope, we’re just friends,” I reply, rotely, when asked. This turn of phrase feels like a betrayal of something that is more sustainable and authentic than most romantic or sexual encounters I’ve had.
The holiness of chavruta
While the English language does not contain a better alternative, the Aramaic language just might. The concept of chavruta, which shares a root with chaver (friend), technically refers to a study partner, but is far more expansive. The rabbis of the Talmud saw chavruta as a partnership filled with passionate energy and concern for one another’s spiritual welfare. In learning and in life, partners would debate, challenge one another and sharpen each other’s skills.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is infused with Jewish elements, from references to Bat Mitzvahs to a game that honored Sadie’s grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. At its core though, it is a story about chavruta. This, I realize, is why I felt such relief. It was therapeutic to see a reflection of the close friendships that are central to my life: the ones I relish, but lack the words to describe.
The rabbis believed that having a chavruta is absolutely critical. In Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), Rabbi Yehoshua ben Perachiah shares essential life wisdom with his students: “Make for yourself a Rav [teacher] and acquire for yourself a chaver [friend/study partner].” Not only is finding a chavruta beneficial, but the lack of such a companion could have dire consequences. Rabbi Yosi b. Rab Hanina issued a harsh warning that “scholars who sit alone to study Torah… grow foolish.” Why was a chavruta relationship so important to them?
Last year, I led a session about friendship for my Rosh Hodesh group of Jewish teens. “In the book of Genesis,” I read from the Moving Traditions curriculum, “God created an ezer kenegdo for Adam, literally a ‘helper against him,’ suggesting a relationship where two equals challenge and complement each other. In what ways do your friends challenge you? In what ways are they your equals?” The teens commented that their best friends tend to be different from them in key ways, bringing out personality traits, ideas or interests that they would not have engaged in otherwise.
Sam and Sadie are “helpers against each other,” sometimes to a fault. They go through periods of tension due to their contrasting personalities and ways of showing care. But at the end of the day, “What Sam loved best was being alone with Sadie and filling a blank slate with their grand ideas. He loved building a world with her.” In life, too, they see what the other cannot, helping one another reach their full potential. During college, when Sadie refuses to leave her bed, Sam pushes her to make a game that changes the course of both of their lives. When Sam refuses to take care of his foot, Sadie moves across the country to ensure he gets the medical attention he needs. At one point, Sam realizes that his creative thoughts don’t feel complete until they pass through Sadie’s mind.
“It’s better than romance… it’s friendship.”
“Boys and girls can’t be friends,” the tired, heteronormative saying goes. But Zevin begs the question: why should someone’s gender be a barrier to friendship? Her tale both addresses and slices through typical gender tropes.
In Sam and Sadie’s first game, Ichigo, they decide that the main character, a child, will be genderless, agreeing that gender “does not matter at that age.” When a company with loads of money offers to buy their game on the condition that Ichigo is a boy, Sadie fights against this change, but eventually acquiesces to Sam’s desire to move forward with the partnership. Just like that, Ichigo becomes a boy: a microcosm of the larger imbalances in the field, as well as how Sam and Sadie’s professional relationship is perceived. Sadie is used to being one of the only women in her coding classes, and Zevin shows readers the difficulties that this tokenization presents, from scrutiny to harsh stereotypes.
When the friends’ game becomes highly successful, the issue of gender becomes even more pronounced. On press tours, it is clear that the world sees Ichigo as Sam. Next to him, “Sadie felt herself diminish.” While she does an equal amount of work on their games, Sam ends up receiving most of the credit. Zevin illuminates the ridiculous expectations put on women: during a photoshoot, a magazine photographer asks, “You two are married, right?” Sam retorts that Sadie doesn’t believe in marriage. “It’ll be different when you have children,” the photographer tells Sadie pointedly.
Despite all of these pressures from the outside world, Zevin is adamant that between Sam and Sadie, they are not simply “a boy and a girl,” but rather two people that are connected on a soul level. The Yiddish word bashert, destiny, is commonly used to mean “soulmate” with the connotation of a romantic life partner. But our chavrutas can also have a bashert quality to them. In a true collaborative partnership, sparks of holiness are abundant. I feel these sparks when I spend time with my chavrutas, as do Sam and Sadie when they create together.
As the book came to a close, I grew nervous that Sadie and Sam would end up as a couple, giving in to the storyline the public begged for. Instead, thankfully, Sadie subverts expectations, reminding Sam that what they have is one of a kind. While finding lovers is “common… true collaborators in this life are rare.”
Language limitations and possibilities
Zevin’s book speaks to the importance of chavruta, as well as its most valuable qualities: creative collaboration and deep mutual love. Partners challenge one another on intellectual and emotional levels. Amidst the atomized nature of modern society, I cannot think of a better antidote to the shallow, fleeting touchpoints technology provides than investing our time and energy into chavruta relationships.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, viewed through the lens of chavruta, captures a divine friendship-collaboration and, in a countercultural move, places it center stage. This story challenges our rigid definitions of relationships, urging readers to think beyond the limited categories the world provides to us. It validates that our most profound connections may not fit society’s mold, but they still matter deeply. In Sam and Sadie’s world, we come to understand that these relationships are not frivolous. They are our lifeblood, and should be treated as such.
As Zevin illustrates, the words used to describe a relationship can determine how seriously it is taken, from hospital visits to cross-country moves. When I told people I was moving to Brooklyn, in large part, to live with my best friend, I was met with confusion. We are taught that major life decisions should only be made with family or romantic partners in mind – but what about chavrutas? What about Sadie and Sam?
In All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews, the narrator notices her friend becoming distant when she finds a romantic partner. “Perhaps this was the way of the world,” she reflects. “Your best friend serving as a placeholder for the real thing: the person who would audition to be your husband or wife.” Reading this, I wonder if this is truly the “way of the world.” Are friendships secondary placeholders while we wait to find the “real thing”? What if it is the other way around – we deem friendships to be less important because media representations and limited language urge us to paint friendships as secondary? Language doesn’t just give us the words to describe what we see, it prescribes the options we have for how to be in the world.
How do we, given our limited vocabulary, find ways to take these connections more seriously? What would happen if we used different words, wresting them from the rigid dichotomies we’re given? Maybe we would allow ourselves to see them as truly important – maybe we would act accordingly. The language our society offers to categorize relationships misses the magic of holy connections: the ones that nourish us, revive us, and allow us to tap into uncharted forms of creativity. The ones that feel bashert, as if we’ve located a piece of our soul we never realized we were searching for.
Featured photo: a digital rendering of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Hokusai.
