Post by Rabbi Neil on Nov 18, 2018 18:04:51 GMT
Here’s a thing that not many people know about me. When children are young, they often have imaginary friends. My imaginary friends were superheroes. Not just any old superheroes, but the superheroes featured in a specific Super Heroes Annual which I had received as a present during my childhood. Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, The Atom, and Green Lantern, they were my imaginary friends. The Justice League of Neil Amswych, I guess. They would go out on adventures to save the world and then they would come back and tell me what they had done while I lay in bed. Then they would either fly away or secret themselves away in my closet while I slept. There weren’t monsters in my closet, there were superheroes. Sometimes in the morning when I would get my clothes out, I’d say hello to them. They were as real to me back then as you are to me now. So, from an early age, without knowing anything about DC and Marvel, I was mainly a DC Superhero fan. There was a simplistic purity to the DC Superheroes. Superman and Wonder Woman, in particular, were unnatural, beyond human. They were perfect.
As a young kid, I remember going to see a stage show featuring Batman and Bugs Bunny. It was amazing. There was Batman, in the 1960s Adam West outfit, fighting villains in front of my very eyes. He and Robin vanquished the Joker, the Penguin and all their henchmen. And somehow Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian were there, too, but I don’t quite remember why! And no, that’s not another part of my weird childhood imagination, it really did exist and I still have the program in a storage box somewhere. But the Batman of my childhood was pure, not the conflicted character that the comics later came to depict him as. Superheroes represented goodness throughout.
In 1984, I went to Hungary to film Anna Karenina with Christopher Reeve. I literally met Superman, and he was everything I had hoped for. My love of Superman moved to a new level. Superman was pure and wholesome and utterly good, which is why the latest incarnation of him in the current DC movies is simply not Superman to me. Superman isn’t broody and glum, he’s what we aspire to be. He’s pure, almost messianic, a point that was made very clear in the 2006 movie Superman Returns. In my childhood, I needed Superman in particular to show me that there was goodness in the world, that helping other people was what life was all about, and that we should never give up.
On TV, I would avidly watch Adam West as Batman and Linda Carter as Wonder Woman. They were good. They reminded me that the world was good, and that evil could be overcome. When I look back, though, there were two superheroes I loved as a kid who weren’t from the DC universe, they were Spiderman and the Hulk. There weren’t many episodes filmed of The Amazing Spiderman, a terrible live-action rendition of the superhero from the late 1970s, but I was captivated. What made Spidey so appealing was that he was the opposite of Superman and Wonder Woman. He was just a regular guy who accidentally was given super powers. It turns out that that was a very deliberate departure from the superhero genre for Stan Lee, who died this week, aged 95. When Marvel commissioned him to create their own superheroes, he saw the perfection of the DC superheroes and inverted it, making his own heroes and villains deeply flawed. Spidey struggled at school, he struggled to get a girlfriend, he was deeply human. Where Superman was naïve with a disturbingly simple moral code, Stan Lee’s superheroes were complicated, just like us, making them extremely appealing to readers. The Hulk was like many of us, a human being who struggles to contain his anger at the world. The key to the success to Spiderman and the Hulk is that they got their superpowers by accident. Anyone could, in theory, become Spiderman or the Hulk if only their life had gone in a particular direction, and often been exposed to enormous amounts of radiation!
There were more differences between DC and Marvel superheroes. Superman lived in Metropolis, Batman in Gotham, Wonder Woman came from Themiscyra. But Spidey lived in New York. Not only his character but his very location was more real to the readership than anything in DC. Their adventures actually happened in our world, not in made-up cities. Some of their back stories were based on real history, like Magneto, a supervillain who learned his hatred of humanity as a young Jewish boy in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. And before you get concerned, I should say that as a Jew, Stan Lee ensured that there were Jewish heroes as well as villains. For example, one famous comic has The Thing, otherwise known as Ben Grimm, stand over a dead body that he finds in the street, and he slowly, hesitantly, starts reciting Sh’ma for the dead man.
As I thought about this sermon and my fondness for superheroes, I realized something very interesting. So fond am I of superheroes that we named all our dogs after them. What’s particularly interesting is that despite my love of DC superheroes as a child, all our dogs have been named after Marvel superheroes – all created by Stan Lee. Parker is named after Peter Parker, who is Spiderman, Logan was one of the X-Men, and Pym is named after Hank Pym, who was the original Ant Man. And yes, when Logan the chihuahua fatally ran straight at a coyote on our property to scare it away, I feel he may have got somewhat carried away with the whole superhero thing! Why the shift from DC to Marvel?
Over the last two decades in particular, the Marvel universe has exploded in popularity, and is now infinitely more influential in popular culture than the DC universe. Black Panther, Stan Lee’s first black character, raised $1.3 billion at the box office, Avengers’ Infinity War raised just over $2 billion. DC’s Justice League didn’t even make half that, although Wonder Woman did pass $800 million. Why has the world shifted so strongly to Marvel superheroes? And what can we learn from this?
The world has changed, very dramatically, since superheroes first appeared. I was in a cross-communal meeting yesterday and we were talking about how different things are for the Jewish community as compared with thirty or forty years ago. In the past, there were many more social rules. There was good, there was evil, it was all easily delineated. Superman and Wonder Woman fit in perfectly into such a world. When I said before that Superman was almost messianic, I really meant it – he’s unreal, inhuman, essentially impossible. As social norms and rules started to break down, as confidence in the total goodness of America started to wane, though, such heroes became icons of the past. Batman, the most human and thus most conflicted DC superhero, came to the fore. The 2006 movie Superman Returns plays off the theme that The World Needs Superman, based off a Pulitzer Prize winning piece by Lois Lane. And in some sense it does. It needs a simple moral code, it needs clear delineation of right and wrong. It needs someone positive with a clear, decent, moral vision. But DC made a fatal mistake. They saw that the success of the Avengers in particular was not because of their clear moral code but, in fact, the opposite. DC saw that Marvel superheroes were popular because they were more real than DC superheroes. In a terrible mistake, they took what was unreal and tried to make it real and gritty. But the world doesn’t need that. The world needs a beacon of hope, a messianic figure, the continual promise of a brighter future. Just as the Messiah in Judaism is both real and unreal, so too were DC’s superheroes. Making them real like the rest of us doesn’t make them enjoyable.
There are, therefore, two kinds of superhero. The DC superheroes overwhelmingly tend to be unreal, often alien. Marvel superheroes tend to be deeply human and flawed, and therefore easier to relate to. From a religious perspective, Marvel superheroes tend to be more like Biblical characters than DC superheroes. The success of the Biblical narrative is not in its perfect characters, but in their deep flaws. Myths in which the heroes are superhuman, immune to corruption, separate from the rest of us, do not capture the imagination or move the heart anything like narratives with deeply flawed characters who nonetheless take humanity forward. Throughout our tradition, there have been those who bend the Biblical text to exonerate any questionable behavior of our Biblical ancestors, but to do so misses the point entirely. For example, Jacob clearly tricked his brother, he clearly acted immorally for his own gain, even though it had been foreseen that success would be his. The Rabbis saw it as totally justifiable! However, Biblically speaking, Hosea, in this week’s Haftarah, was critical of him. The Rabbis wanted DC, but the Bible wanted Marvel.
What can we learn from all this? We spend too long idealizing heroes, and having them exist separately from us. It’s too easy to see heroes as other and non-human, or as parental, messianic or even God-like. To me, the key lesson of Marvel superheroes is the idea that all of us can be superheroes. We may not be able to fly without assistance, but we can control our tempers when we become angry, we can think about others, we can put ourselves on the line for the common good, we can protect the vulnerable. In essence, the prophetic call of the Bible is a rallying cry for superheroes. We can appreciate the great power that we all have, and the great responsibility that comes with it. The World Doesn’t Need Superman. It needs us to be super people. May we, then, find our own super powers and use them for good. May we not berate ourselves for our flaws, and instead see that our greatness is in overcoming them, not in not having them at all. May we be selfless in our pursuit of goodness, and tireless in our striving for a better world. And may we learn the lessons that Stan Lee tried to teach us all through his superheroes – that it’s possible to be rejected, to be shy and awkward, to be angry, to not always succeed in life, and yet still be a hero. May we therefore all find our super powers, and continue from strength to super strength, and let us say, Amen.
As a young kid, I remember going to see a stage show featuring Batman and Bugs Bunny. It was amazing. There was Batman, in the 1960s Adam West outfit, fighting villains in front of my very eyes. He and Robin vanquished the Joker, the Penguin and all their henchmen. And somehow Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian were there, too, but I don’t quite remember why! And no, that’s not another part of my weird childhood imagination, it really did exist and I still have the program in a storage box somewhere. But the Batman of my childhood was pure, not the conflicted character that the comics later came to depict him as. Superheroes represented goodness throughout.
In 1984, I went to Hungary to film Anna Karenina with Christopher Reeve. I literally met Superman, and he was everything I had hoped for. My love of Superman moved to a new level. Superman was pure and wholesome and utterly good, which is why the latest incarnation of him in the current DC movies is simply not Superman to me. Superman isn’t broody and glum, he’s what we aspire to be. He’s pure, almost messianic, a point that was made very clear in the 2006 movie Superman Returns. In my childhood, I needed Superman in particular to show me that there was goodness in the world, that helping other people was what life was all about, and that we should never give up.
On TV, I would avidly watch Adam West as Batman and Linda Carter as Wonder Woman. They were good. They reminded me that the world was good, and that evil could be overcome. When I look back, though, there were two superheroes I loved as a kid who weren’t from the DC universe, they were Spiderman and the Hulk. There weren’t many episodes filmed of The Amazing Spiderman, a terrible live-action rendition of the superhero from the late 1970s, but I was captivated. What made Spidey so appealing was that he was the opposite of Superman and Wonder Woman. He was just a regular guy who accidentally was given super powers. It turns out that that was a very deliberate departure from the superhero genre for Stan Lee, who died this week, aged 95. When Marvel commissioned him to create their own superheroes, he saw the perfection of the DC superheroes and inverted it, making his own heroes and villains deeply flawed. Spidey struggled at school, he struggled to get a girlfriend, he was deeply human. Where Superman was naïve with a disturbingly simple moral code, Stan Lee’s superheroes were complicated, just like us, making them extremely appealing to readers. The Hulk was like many of us, a human being who struggles to contain his anger at the world. The key to the success to Spiderman and the Hulk is that they got their superpowers by accident. Anyone could, in theory, become Spiderman or the Hulk if only their life had gone in a particular direction, and often been exposed to enormous amounts of radiation!
There were more differences between DC and Marvel superheroes. Superman lived in Metropolis, Batman in Gotham, Wonder Woman came from Themiscyra. But Spidey lived in New York. Not only his character but his very location was more real to the readership than anything in DC. Their adventures actually happened in our world, not in made-up cities. Some of their back stories were based on real history, like Magneto, a supervillain who learned his hatred of humanity as a young Jewish boy in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. And before you get concerned, I should say that as a Jew, Stan Lee ensured that there were Jewish heroes as well as villains. For example, one famous comic has The Thing, otherwise known as Ben Grimm, stand over a dead body that he finds in the street, and he slowly, hesitantly, starts reciting Sh’ma for the dead man.
As I thought about this sermon and my fondness for superheroes, I realized something very interesting. So fond am I of superheroes that we named all our dogs after them. What’s particularly interesting is that despite my love of DC superheroes as a child, all our dogs have been named after Marvel superheroes – all created by Stan Lee. Parker is named after Peter Parker, who is Spiderman, Logan was one of the X-Men, and Pym is named after Hank Pym, who was the original Ant Man. And yes, when Logan the chihuahua fatally ran straight at a coyote on our property to scare it away, I feel he may have got somewhat carried away with the whole superhero thing! Why the shift from DC to Marvel?
Over the last two decades in particular, the Marvel universe has exploded in popularity, and is now infinitely more influential in popular culture than the DC universe. Black Panther, Stan Lee’s first black character, raised $1.3 billion at the box office, Avengers’ Infinity War raised just over $2 billion. DC’s Justice League didn’t even make half that, although Wonder Woman did pass $800 million. Why has the world shifted so strongly to Marvel superheroes? And what can we learn from this?
The world has changed, very dramatically, since superheroes first appeared. I was in a cross-communal meeting yesterday and we were talking about how different things are for the Jewish community as compared with thirty or forty years ago. In the past, there were many more social rules. There was good, there was evil, it was all easily delineated. Superman and Wonder Woman fit in perfectly into such a world. When I said before that Superman was almost messianic, I really meant it – he’s unreal, inhuman, essentially impossible. As social norms and rules started to break down, as confidence in the total goodness of America started to wane, though, such heroes became icons of the past. Batman, the most human and thus most conflicted DC superhero, came to the fore. The 2006 movie Superman Returns plays off the theme that The World Needs Superman, based off a Pulitzer Prize winning piece by Lois Lane. And in some sense it does. It needs a simple moral code, it needs clear delineation of right and wrong. It needs someone positive with a clear, decent, moral vision. But DC made a fatal mistake. They saw that the success of the Avengers in particular was not because of their clear moral code but, in fact, the opposite. DC saw that Marvel superheroes were popular because they were more real than DC superheroes. In a terrible mistake, they took what was unreal and tried to make it real and gritty. But the world doesn’t need that. The world needs a beacon of hope, a messianic figure, the continual promise of a brighter future. Just as the Messiah in Judaism is both real and unreal, so too were DC’s superheroes. Making them real like the rest of us doesn’t make them enjoyable.
There are, therefore, two kinds of superhero. The DC superheroes overwhelmingly tend to be unreal, often alien. Marvel superheroes tend to be deeply human and flawed, and therefore easier to relate to. From a religious perspective, Marvel superheroes tend to be more like Biblical characters than DC superheroes. The success of the Biblical narrative is not in its perfect characters, but in their deep flaws. Myths in which the heroes are superhuman, immune to corruption, separate from the rest of us, do not capture the imagination or move the heart anything like narratives with deeply flawed characters who nonetheless take humanity forward. Throughout our tradition, there have been those who bend the Biblical text to exonerate any questionable behavior of our Biblical ancestors, but to do so misses the point entirely. For example, Jacob clearly tricked his brother, he clearly acted immorally for his own gain, even though it had been foreseen that success would be his. The Rabbis saw it as totally justifiable! However, Biblically speaking, Hosea, in this week’s Haftarah, was critical of him. The Rabbis wanted DC, but the Bible wanted Marvel.
What can we learn from all this? We spend too long idealizing heroes, and having them exist separately from us. It’s too easy to see heroes as other and non-human, or as parental, messianic or even God-like. To me, the key lesson of Marvel superheroes is the idea that all of us can be superheroes. We may not be able to fly without assistance, but we can control our tempers when we become angry, we can think about others, we can put ourselves on the line for the common good, we can protect the vulnerable. In essence, the prophetic call of the Bible is a rallying cry for superheroes. We can appreciate the great power that we all have, and the great responsibility that comes with it. The World Doesn’t Need Superman. It needs us to be super people. May we, then, find our own super powers and use them for good. May we not berate ourselves for our flaws, and instead see that our greatness is in overcoming them, not in not having them at all. May we be selfless in our pursuit of goodness, and tireless in our striving for a better world. And may we learn the lessons that Stan Lee tried to teach us all through his superheroes – that it’s possible to be rejected, to be shy and awkward, to be angry, to not always succeed in life, and yet still be a hero. May we therefore all find our super powers, and continue from strength to super strength, and let us say, Amen.