To the World 🥂

Obviously Crowley isn’t ethnically or religiously Jewish, but it’s a pretty major part of Judaism and Jewish identity to question God and reinterpret the Torah as times change, and he specified that this was what he was referring to when discussing Crowley’s Jewishness.

His parallels to Christians who lose their faith are far more immediately apparent, so I could just be grasping at straws here, but there’s something about the way Crowley doesn’t fit easily inside Christian mythos, how he’s the first to really embrace life on Earth, and how he routinely dismisses Heaven and Hell that has a distinctly Jewish feel to it.

It’s also implied he had a closer relationship to God and Metatron than many of the other supernatural characters. When he tries to talk to God in S1E4, his tone is casual, and his language implies that God spoke to him at some point about His/Her plans for humanity. It’s almost as if he’s talking to a friend, which is a huge contrast to Aziraphale’s attempt to contact Him/Her (i.e. the ritual circle). Crowley’s also the first to recognize Metatron when he comes to Earth in S2, even after several instances of forgetting angels and demons he worked with previously.

This isn’t to say that Jews are somehow closer to God than Christians, just that - from what I’ve seen - Jews tend to have a more casual, interpersonal approach to their relationship with God than many more serious Christians. For example, the ideal of being “godfearing” seems to be more prominent and highly praised in Christian communities than Jewish ones, and the disparity between God and humans in Christianity (that God is infallible and perfect, and the humans are born tainted with sin) is really not a major part of Judaism at all. Rather, Jews see humans (and the Jewish people specifically) as having a role in making the world a better place, and that Satan is a tool of God’s to help challenge people to be better than their baser instincts. While I can’t speak to Crowley’s beliefs on that, his lack of total deference without any outright hostility seems more similar to the Jewish relationship to God than the Christian one.

That implied closeness could also be a hint at Crowley’s angelic alter-ego, and it might have nothing to do with Judaism. Unfortunately there’s no real way of confirming one way or the other until the third season comes out.

It seems like the ending’s a bit controversial already, but personally, I’m excited to really see Aziraphale dig deep into moral ambiguity.

So far, he’s been able to get by on believing that God has an all-knowing, ineffable plan with morals he agrees with, and that all the other angels are just misinterpreting that mission. Whenever he had real doubts, (particularly this season) he was able to ignore them by doing what was right, while still avoiding any outright confrontations with God’s plan. Him and Crowley just quietly fixed things, and he never had to turn away from God completely (at least in his own mind).

It’s clear too from the finale that he saw Crowley’s fall as a mistake, rather than a justified act of rebellion. That, yes, he has come to respect Crowley and believe in his goodness over thousands of years, but instead of learning that moral quality isn’t determined by institutions, he “learned” that Crowley never should’ve fallen in the first place (because he’s good at heart, he must still be an *angel* at heart, right?).

With him at the top, he’ll be forced to confront the root of it, and I think it’ll be pretty amazing to see what he finds.