The following contains some spoilers for the “Severance” finale but still remains mysterious (and important).
“Is this the story of the Akedah?” I half jokingly asked my husband as a goat was about to get sacrificed in the “Severance” finale, referring to the binding of Isaac, when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his eldest, and instead, accepts a sacrifice of a sheep. In that story, the sacrifice is a test of Abraham’s faith and devotion. It’s a tale that leaves many with complex and uncomfortable feelings, just like “Severance.”
As a Jewish writer, I often try to find any Jewish tidbit from the shows and movies that I enjoy in hopes it gives me an excuse to write about something I love. I became quickly obsessed with “Severance,” the dystopic sci-fi show in which people working for a mysterious company called Lumon can split their consciousness into two, one their work self, their innie, the other their “real life” self, their outie. And so I began a quiet tally. Ben Stiller sits at the helm as director. Patricia Arquette, who plays Mrs. Cobel, Adam Scott’s Mark S.’s former boss, is Jewish, as is the austere Sandra Bernhard, perfectly cast for her role as Gemma’s keeper (Gemma is the wife Mark’s outie believes died, but instead is being kept on a different floor in Lumon, experimented on by being severed into multiple identities that go into different rooms). The last name of Tramell Tillman’s character, Milchik, is the Yiddish word used to point out when something is dairy and therefore should not be mixed with meat (one Redditor had a particularly profound observation about the way it applies to the Milchik’s Blackness). When Mrs. Cobel sings “Kier, Chosen One, Kier,” about the company’s mysterious messiah-like founder, Kier Eagan, and when a marching band plays the song in the finale, I heard the echoes of “Oseh Shalom” in the melody (the show’s composer is Theodore Shapiro, a very Jewish name indeed).
And then, there are the goats.
Goats have a lot of significance in Judaism, and on “Severance,” too. This latest season we met Lumon’s Mammalians Nurturable Department, run by Gwendoline Christie of “Game of Thrones” fame, in which workers are charged with tending to and raising goats. It’s utterly bewildering like everything Lumon does, but we get a glimpse into the purpose of the goats in the finale, where Drummond demands a goat sacrifice in honor of Gemma finally getting through Cold Harbor.
In Judaism, goats are featured in many texts. They are especially significant when it comes to Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and the holiday that Ben Stiller is perhaps most connected to. Seriously. It’s featured in the movie “Keeping the Faith,” where he plays a rabbi during the High Holidays; he joked about making a Yom Kippur song as iconic and Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song” when he paid tribute to him at the Mark Twain Awards; he sang about Yom Kippur in a “Willy Wonka” inspired opening number when he hosted SNL. He even mentioned the Jewish holiday on the recent episode of the Severance Podcast when talking to Cristopher Walken.
On Yom Kippur, Jews traditionally go to synagogue to read about Aaron and Moshe’s atonement to God through a yearly offering of two goats. That story is actually the origin of the term “scapegoat.” One goat was meant to be, just like the one in “Severance,” sacrificed, slaughtered, his blood an offering at God’s altar. The other, the scapegoat, gets to bear the weight of all our sins of the past year, but is left alive to wander free and given to Azazel, a mysterious word that may or may not mean hell, it reads in the book of Leviticus.
In the “Severance” finale, the goat is meant to be a test of devotion, too. Christie’s character doesn’t want to sacrifice the animal she’s named and has nurtured since their birth. How many more will I have to sacrifice, she asks, pleadingly, tormented. It was perhaps one of the most resonant moments for me, making me think about how many kids are sacrificed at the altars of the egos of men… but I digress.
The goat (via Apple TV+)
While we don’t sacrifice goats or animals anymore, that tradition, not invented by the Jews, was really common during biblical times and during the period of the first and second Temples, where priests would regularly make sacrifices, korbanot, to God, sometimes of crops and other goods, but also of goats and other animals traditionally raised and eaten. It makes sense Lumon’s strange cult-leader-like founder with his biblical lore would incorporate these traditions into his company’s strange rituals (my colleague Evelyn Frick I believe rightly posits that Kier could have been antisemitic, which seems highly likely, but that doesn’t seem to go against this idea, as the concept also very much echoes in Christianity).
We don’t own goats anymore, so instead, on Yom Kippur, we fast from one sunset to another. At the end, we get a clean slate, we hope, for the next year.
Stiller’s love for Yom Kippur comes to him from his father, Jerry Stiller. “My dad always used to like Yom Kippur in the Jewish religion because you go there and you atone for your sins and you start fresh,” he told Walken in that podcast episode.
In the “Severance” finale, the goat as sacrifice takes place at what is meant to be a turning point for the company, as many characters in the show remind us, a juncture in which ritual sacrifices are often made. Gemma completing Cold Harbor, innie Mark S. completing the Cold Harbor file — they are meant to be the beginning of a fresh slate for Lumon itself, just like (a very ominous and not at all good version of) Yom Kippur.
But I think the analogy of the two goat Yom Kippur sacrifice can also be taken to the idea of “Severance” itself, with the innie and outie each symbolizing one of each. The innie is a finite existence, a sacrificial lamb, there to work hard for the sustenance of his outie until he can be “put down” when his outie retires. While he doesn’t know it, the innie is, in a way, a payment for the sins of the outtie, a way for him to avoid suffering. As for the outie, it seems he is left to wander the world unmoored, like a kid goat wandering through the desert. None of the outies in the show seem particularly happy in their outside world, their existence consumed by a hole, unable to really escape that original sin that had made them sever. There’s even something about Irving’s outtie manic paintings of a Lumon hallway that remind me of the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman’s obsessive goat paintings.
Is this really what Dan Erickson, creator of “Severance” and non-Jewish person, intended? Unlikely. But still, once you set a show into the world, like a goat into the wilderness, people make with it what they will.
