[WIKI] sarkasm spread your wings
to everyone's delight
summary
we crash at the speed of light
history
so deep in the whitest white
Jack is descended from the Tribe of Benjamin, one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, more specifically the royal line of Saul through Jonathan and subsequently Mephibosheth, Saul's only heir to survive David's succession. His ancestors were the hundred and fifty sons of Ulam, archers and warriors known for their valor. Supposedly granted God's protection through David's covenant with Jonathan, members the royal line of Saul gained an unusual sensitivity to the divine in turn. They were born leaders, exhibiting a slight unearthly charisma and an occasionally inexplicable tendency for matters of fortune to go their way. Of course, Saul's crimes had also marked the bloodline. Subsequent generations were prone to hereditary diseases and blood cancers. As a result, most branches of the family died out well before the twentieth century, and in those that remained, the bloodline weakened with every passing generation.
After three thousand years, being descended from the line of Saul wouldn't mean much in practical terms - a little luck, a little charm, an odd affinity for projectile weapons - but where certain qualities skip a generation, others skip several hundred.
Shortly after the restoration of the State of Israel, Silas Benjamin was born with his bloodline's fading gifts in tenfold. He used these qualities for his own political advancement, mirroring the rapid success (and impending doom) of his ancient ancestor, Saul. His family has similarly followed in their ancestors' footsteps.
Jack inherited only a fraction of his father's preternatural charm, but all of his namesake Jonathan's longing to serve a God-anointed king. Like all members of his bloodline, he feels a constant need to connect to the divine. Unfortunately for Jack, God is dead. Not long after he was born, his God, all the little-g gods, and most of the rest of the divine disappeared from his universe.
Jack, never able to name what he was missing but poignantly aware of the loss all the same, has been trying to fill that void ever since. As a child, he strove to match his father's religious fervor; as a teen, he switched to a desperate blend of hedonism and vice; in young-adulthood he looked for solace in military discipline, and by twenty-five he was a veritable train wreck of disillusionment, half out of his mind for want of something that no longer existed.
Fortunately, when Jack went AWOL to Israel to clear his head later that year, his paternal grandmother picked up on the issue. Being rather more aware of the supernatural peculiarities of their bloodline than the rest of the family, she helped Jack arrange some morally ambiguous psychic surgery in an effort to tame that want. Pieces of a soul from one of the old witches' lines - Bene Elohim, children of Nephilim from before the time of Saul - were grafted to his own in hopes that, if Nephilim are strictly divine (as is the canonical view in Judaism), their descendants' residual divinity would provide a reasonable substitute for God. Jack tries not to think about where, exactly, those pieces of soul came from.
The procedure was successful, at least to the extent that it left Jack able to function without descending into self-destructive spirals every other week. He still has his bad days, but he can generally write them off to his fiery temper and nobody's the wiser.
this could have been our burial site
Jack's psychic surgery enhanced his natural abilities, but these are still pretty subtle. His luck is better than most people's, but not by a lot. He does have supernatural charisma, but it works better on groups than individuals. Even then, he can't change people's minds if they're already against him; he can only foster whatever positive (or negative) feelings exist. One-on-one, he's lucky to talk himself out of a parking ticket. Of course, he likes to think he can talk himself out of parking tickets without supernatural assistance, so he doesn't use these abilities especially often.