Post by Rabbi Neil on Feb 9, 2020 19:23:42 GMT
The last time I started to give a Star Wars sermon, one member who unfortunately couldn’t be here this evening audibly groaned “Not again!” But yes, again! I now believe that not to do so would be a dereliction of my Rabbinic duty, and I mean that seriously. Allow me to explain why.
I always knew that George Lucas intended Star Wars to be nine episodes, but once Luke defeated and redeemed Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi, thereby freeing the galaxy, I had no need for any further episodes. It made sense that they would create Episodes 1-3 just to give back story, but in my mind there was no need for 7-9, because good had beaten evil. So, when the first prequel – The Phantom Menace - was released in 1999, I went to see it just to fill in the backstory for episodes 4-6. But I hated it… I loathed it. It took the Star Wars story in a totally different direction – it introduced Midichlorians and tried to quantify The Force, the core mystical aspect of Star Wars, the one thing that you just cannot quantify. How much kavannah did you have during our prayers earlier? You can’t measure that with an instrument, you just know it. But even worse than trying to quantify the Force, the movie said that Anakin Skywalker, who later became Darth Vader, was born of a virgin. As a Jew, that got me very angry. That’s not my story - that’s another faith community’s story. To add insult to injury, it introduced slapstick into Star Wars where it had never before existed.
Once Disney bought Star Wars, they announced Episode VII – The Force Awakens – and although I love Star Wars, I was originally disappointed because it meant that Luke Skywalker’s victory over evil at the end of Episode VI (The Return of the Jedi) wasn’t complete. War continued, and that was deeply dispiriting to me because that meant that all Luke had achieved was to temporarily hold back evil, not to defeat it. So, when I went to see the movie, I know that I was already apprehensive. When I came out, I was disappointed because it was basically a repeat of the older stories. Talking of the new superweapon in that movie, Han Solo even asks, “Okay, how do we blow it up? There’s always a way to do that,” as though openly acknowledging that this episode, set thirty years after the last one, wasn’t original at all. If the war was continuing, I wanted the story to go somewhere new, but it was just repeating. Instead of Luke, now there’s Rey. Instead of R2-D2, there’s BB-8. Instead of the Death Star, there’s Starkiller Base. Instead of wiping out a planet, now the villains wipe out an entire system of planets. The only major difference was that the cast was far more inclusive. Everything else was essentially the same narrative, just told slightly differently.
But after The Force Awakens was released, I read an extraordinary commentary online about how The First Order, as the villains were now called, was far more terrifying than The Empire, as the villains used to be called. The First Order, said the commentary, were Empire wannabees, the neo-Nazis of today, the people trying to create order through fear and not seeing the order that already existed through diversity and individuality. That commentary alone opened up Star Wars in a totally different way for me. Was it all political commentary? Was the original trilogy really a critique of imperialism and militarism, particularly stemming from the Vietnam War? I explored much further. In 2005, George Lucas, the original creator of Star Wars, said that “while the psychological basis of Star Wars is mythological, the political and social bases are historical.” The original Star Wars movie, it seems, wasn’t just a critique of American imperialism, but of all imperialism, from ancient Rome to Nazi Germany and beyond. “Don’t be so proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed,” originally warned Darth Vader, the epitome of evil openly warning against weapons of mass destruction the likes of which still lingered over all of us in real life while the Cold War simmered for decades. When Reagan created the Star Wars program, exactly the kind of technological terror that Darth Vader warned against, the irony of that critique was obviously totally lost on him. Throughout the Star Wars saga, the Jedi repeat a theme, that blasters are “so uncivilized” and that the light saber is “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.” That’s partly because George Lucas turned to Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 samurai classic “The Hidden Fortress” for inspiration for the original movie. In that movie, two lowly peasants, Tahei and Mataschichi squabble through the desert after a battle in a 16th century Japanese civil war. They split up, are captured and are eventually reunited. They are brought back into the conflict, helping a bearded general escort a princess back to her homeland. Anyone who has seen A New Hope (the original Star Wars movie) will recognize that story immediately. Lucas took those two peasants – one tall and one short – and put them in a new setting, a galactic civil war, and turned them into the droids C-3PO and R2-D2. He took the swords and turned them into lightsabers. Blasters were uncivilized because to shoot someone from afar is totally different to engaging them in immediate combat. Star Wars is ultimately about relationship, about facing our fears and our enemies. People talk of Lucas stealing from the Kurosawa, or plagiarizing The Hidden Fortress, but to make that claim totally misses the point of Star Wars. Star Wars is life because life is lived through narrative.
As my studies into Star Wars went further, I kept coming across the work of Joseph Campbell, who wrote that “it has always been on myths that the moral orders of societies have been founded,” including “the myths canonized as religion” (Myths to Live By, p.10). So strong is the power of myth, Campbell notes, that what differentiates human and animal psychology is, according to him, the “subordination in the human sphere of even economics to mythology” (op. cit., p.20). Our lives are shaped around myth. Myth is what helps us make sense of the world around us. When we raise children, we teach them a myth to help them make sense of the world around them. Everyone does it. For some people that is a religious myth, for others not. But we always pass onto the next generation our own myth. Campbell makes an extraordinary point that human children are born too early. In the non-human world, animals are usually born and immediately work to their surroundings, often flying, walking or swimming from the very instant that they are born. Human children are not. We have to slowly learn how to function in the world around us, and it takes us years. As we learn to adapt to the physical environment around us, says Campbell, so too we become structured to accord with our social environment, and thus become a part of an efficiently functioning social order. We do that by absorbing the myths of our social group and by participating in its rites, since rites are the physical enactment of myths (Myths We Live By, page. 45).
Why is our society struggling so profoundly at the moment? Because the myth upon which our society was based, the Biblical myth, has collapsed. Viewed historically, we know without question that this is a work of fiction, only very loosely based on some historical events, but that realization in and of itself is terrifying for those whose lives are based entirely around that myth. So, they retreat into fundamentalism, insisting that anything that disproves their myth is simply wrong, or evil. By necessity, they subconsciously read their myth in a way that protects their position of dominance in society, that allows them to be the Empire without realizing the evil that they are doing. They view the act of rejecting their myth and the myth of their ancestors as an act of rebellion, a disgusting act of defiance against the social order. People will literally kill, or allow others to be killed, in order to protect the myth that gives structure to their world. The claim of orthodox adherents of any religion is that their myth is the only true myth, but it’s not. It’s just a different retelling of the myth that holds every individual society together. Of course the Biblical myth was going to break down as human society became more globalized and more scientific, because it was no longer the way to describe human experience, but a way. The Torah is, at times, savage, just as it is wondrous. Our textual tradition can be brutal and oppressive, as well as transcendent and beautiful. And that’s fine because that was our original telling of the human myth, and it reflected ancient society as much as it reflected that which transcends humanity. Two thousand years ago, a group of people broke away from that myth and wrote their own, a myth with a totally differing focus, which ultimately created an entirely new religion. In order to promote their myth, they had to denigrate, oppress and even kill those who held the previous myth. They had to be the villains in the new myth in order to justify its adoption into society. And this is a pattern that has been repeated throughout human history. Religious intolerance stems from the mistaken belief in the primacy of one myth over another. That has been the greatest failure of religion since recorded human history began. It is not that religion itself is flawed, but the zealous belief that one myth prevails over all others, that one group is chosen to bring enlightenment to an otherwise savage or backwards human race, that in and of itself has probably caused more suffering than anything else in human history. Sometimes that was not even a religious myth, but an economic or social one. In short, the imposition of one myth on a society by force – whether economic or physical - is and will always be a great evil. For the Jewish myth to survive, it has to reject all claims to being the only myth, and we need to embrace it merely as our own myth. That, in fact, is almost certainly why Judaism was never a proselytizing religion – because we have our myth and you have yours and that’s how it should be! That said, that may have been more a response to the changing political position of the Jewish community – when it had military power, our myth clearly tells of wiping out cultures that held to differing myths, particularly those that saw divinity in nature itself. When the Jewish community lost its military might, as we move into actual recorded history, only then it seems that the Jewish community accepted mythical pluralism.
Our myth is unique. There are many myths worldwide that start with the creation of everything around us. Societies use that myth to arrange their moral structure. That myth can be a cosmological fight between Gods, it can be the Big Bang, or it can be the God of the Bible creating the universe. While one of those has actual scientific backing in terms of its historical veracity, nonetheless they are all myths around which society is structured. Torah was our myth, it still is, it’s just that as the Jewish community met with other cultures, it started influencing their myths and also being influenced by their myths, especially with communities where the myths intersected. Torah didn’t steal from the Babylonian Enuma Elish just as George Lucas didn’t steal from The Hidden Fortress. They were retelling a myth for their age, responding to the historical facts of their time. These myths tend to have similar themes, because they are so often based around the hero’s journey. Luke Skywalker, son of Darth Vader, eventually vanquishes his father with the help of the Force. Moses, raised as son of Pharaoh, vanquishes his adopted father with the help of God. But then the struggle continues without Luke, just as it continues without Moses in the rest of Tanach. We don’t read the Bible because it tells us what to do, because it’s the only truth - we read it because it’s an original version of the telling of Star Wars, or of any story of human life. It’s the hero’s journey – the journey to transcend the self regardless of where and when we were born, the journey become the hero, not through technological enhancement, but through the search within. It’s not anti-technology – of course not. The Tabernacle in the Wilderness is a wondrous physical construction, but then so is the Golden Calf. Similarly, the Rebels rely on technological wonders like the Millennium Falcon, or Luke’s robotic replacement hand, but also know of the dangers of the Death Star and Starkiller Base and Darth Vader who is described as “more machine now than man, twisted and evil”. Both Torah and Star Wars guide us to go beyond that which we can make in our own hands and not be seduced by the idolatry of that which we can form with our own hands. They try to remind us to look beyond what we see, to reach out with our feelings. That is our myth.
I now understand why Anakin Skywalker was born of a virgin, precisely because it is common mythical hook around the world upon which to hang the same message, the message of the hero’s journey. As opposed to the virgin birth in Christianity, though, the recent Star Wars canon as expressed in the comics, took that mythical hook and changed it by confirming the fan theory that this virgin birth was brought about by the actual epitome of evil, who wasn’t, as we all thought, Darth Vader but was in fact Palpatine, Vader’s master. Anakin was created by Senator Palpatine just as Vader was created by Emperor Palpatine later. The hero’s journey of birth, transformation and sometimes even glorious death, is a common trope. George Lucas wasn’t stealing from a world religion, he was telling the human story in a different way. He was using the same tropes while challenging them. In his book The Art of Biblical Narrative, Robert Alter describes how Torah deliberately repeats certain themes, such as the wife/sister theme, or the younger usurping the older theme. Having the same themes or hooks but telling differing stories around them is how myth is reinforced and kept exciting for every new generation.
Sitting with my children watching the final Star Wars movie this morning in December 2019, I remembered my father sitting with me watching what we thought then was the final Star Wars movie back in May 1983. Every generation tells the story that defines it in a different way. And we in the Jewish community have to tell our story in a different way. We have to honor the former ways that we transmitted our myth, particularly through the rituals that brought that myth to life for thousands of years. But we also have to tell that story anew. We have to bring midrash, the search for the story behind the story, to the fore. We have to tell that story from new perspectives, such as through feminist interpretation. Sometimes we might tell that story through a scientific lens, like counting Midichlorians, although we have to be very careful of that route because it masks the real story, which is deeply mystical. Sometimes, we have to tell the story through comedy, perhaps even slapstick, as we might on the festival of Purim. Some people will like the new telling, some will not. But we have to tell that myth in a different way for every different generation, while keeping the core of that myth alive.
Kylo Ren was wrong in The Last Jedi when he said, “Let the past die – kill it if you have to.” Don’t kill it, retell it. Find new meaning in it. Take the human myth and, to quote Ben Bag Bag, “turn it and turn it for everything is in it” (Pirke Avot 5:22). See the value in differing religions’ telling of the story, of how they structure their lives, and then see the value of our own unique story and the myth that our community has told for thousands of years in differing ways. And tell it again. Don’t let it die. Reform Judaism has for two hundred years been the attempt to retell our myth once we realized that ours wasn’t the only myth of value. It has been the attempt to tell a myth that says that that a perfect future is possible, that it is possible to overcome evil, but to achieve that we must relieve the burden of the oppressed, lift up those bent low, to protect the widow and the orphan and the stranger. The myth of Chanukah, which starts on Sunday, is a myth of hope, a myth that inspires us to overcome all odds and to bring light in dark times. That is the same myth as Star Wars, it’s the same myth that has been told thousands of differing ways around the world throughout human history. It’s the myth that gets us out of bed in the morning, the myth of a new hope, of connecting to the transcendent in the mundane world around us, of being conduits of the Force, or of God, to bring balance and, ultimately, redemption. It is not my story, or your story, it is our story – the story of generations before and the generations that come after.
We cannot keep telling the story the same way and expect the next generation to accept it. When a child stands before us at bat or bar mitzvah, they’re not saying that they’re ready to take on the yoke of mitzvot, but, rather, that they are ready to take our myth into the next generation, to make it their own. It’s time for a new telling of the myth. It’s time for the old version to end, and for a new version to begin. To do that brings honor to the myth, and especially to the previous ways it was told. We cannot tell the story anew if we do not know how it was told in the past. The joy is in the retelling, in the reshaping of the same myth in recognizable but also in novel ways. That is why we have to study Torah, we have to study our tradition, because otherwise we cannot tell our story anew. We cannot keep the myth going if we don’t know where it’s been. And it is a good myth, a wonderful myth, a myth that looks forward to a better world. May our religious task be to tell that myth anew, to keep the spark of rebellion against tyranny alive in the next generation. May our myth of liberation be the one that guides us into a better future. May our myth of hope help us be “the spark that lights the fire that burns down” (Poe Dameron, The Last Jedi) injustice and cruelty so that we never despair, never give up, until that wonderful day when the wolf will lie down with the lamb, and a little child, the next generation of myth-teller, shall lead them (Is. 11:6). And let us say, Amen.
I always knew that George Lucas intended Star Wars to be nine episodes, but once Luke defeated and redeemed Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi, thereby freeing the galaxy, I had no need for any further episodes. It made sense that they would create Episodes 1-3 just to give back story, but in my mind there was no need for 7-9, because good had beaten evil. So, when the first prequel – The Phantom Menace - was released in 1999, I went to see it just to fill in the backstory for episodes 4-6. But I hated it… I loathed it. It took the Star Wars story in a totally different direction – it introduced Midichlorians and tried to quantify The Force, the core mystical aspect of Star Wars, the one thing that you just cannot quantify. How much kavannah did you have during our prayers earlier? You can’t measure that with an instrument, you just know it. But even worse than trying to quantify the Force, the movie said that Anakin Skywalker, who later became Darth Vader, was born of a virgin. As a Jew, that got me very angry. That’s not my story - that’s another faith community’s story. To add insult to injury, it introduced slapstick into Star Wars where it had never before existed.
Once Disney bought Star Wars, they announced Episode VII – The Force Awakens – and although I love Star Wars, I was originally disappointed because it meant that Luke Skywalker’s victory over evil at the end of Episode VI (The Return of the Jedi) wasn’t complete. War continued, and that was deeply dispiriting to me because that meant that all Luke had achieved was to temporarily hold back evil, not to defeat it. So, when I went to see the movie, I know that I was already apprehensive. When I came out, I was disappointed because it was basically a repeat of the older stories. Talking of the new superweapon in that movie, Han Solo even asks, “Okay, how do we blow it up? There’s always a way to do that,” as though openly acknowledging that this episode, set thirty years after the last one, wasn’t original at all. If the war was continuing, I wanted the story to go somewhere new, but it was just repeating. Instead of Luke, now there’s Rey. Instead of R2-D2, there’s BB-8. Instead of the Death Star, there’s Starkiller Base. Instead of wiping out a planet, now the villains wipe out an entire system of planets. The only major difference was that the cast was far more inclusive. Everything else was essentially the same narrative, just told slightly differently.
But after The Force Awakens was released, I read an extraordinary commentary online about how The First Order, as the villains were now called, was far more terrifying than The Empire, as the villains used to be called. The First Order, said the commentary, were Empire wannabees, the neo-Nazis of today, the people trying to create order through fear and not seeing the order that already existed through diversity and individuality. That commentary alone opened up Star Wars in a totally different way for me. Was it all political commentary? Was the original trilogy really a critique of imperialism and militarism, particularly stemming from the Vietnam War? I explored much further. In 2005, George Lucas, the original creator of Star Wars, said that “while the psychological basis of Star Wars is mythological, the political and social bases are historical.” The original Star Wars movie, it seems, wasn’t just a critique of American imperialism, but of all imperialism, from ancient Rome to Nazi Germany and beyond. “Don’t be so proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed,” originally warned Darth Vader, the epitome of evil openly warning against weapons of mass destruction the likes of which still lingered over all of us in real life while the Cold War simmered for decades. When Reagan created the Star Wars program, exactly the kind of technological terror that Darth Vader warned against, the irony of that critique was obviously totally lost on him. Throughout the Star Wars saga, the Jedi repeat a theme, that blasters are “so uncivilized” and that the light saber is “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.” That’s partly because George Lucas turned to Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 samurai classic “The Hidden Fortress” for inspiration for the original movie. In that movie, two lowly peasants, Tahei and Mataschichi squabble through the desert after a battle in a 16th century Japanese civil war. They split up, are captured and are eventually reunited. They are brought back into the conflict, helping a bearded general escort a princess back to her homeland. Anyone who has seen A New Hope (the original Star Wars movie) will recognize that story immediately. Lucas took those two peasants – one tall and one short – and put them in a new setting, a galactic civil war, and turned them into the droids C-3PO and R2-D2. He took the swords and turned them into lightsabers. Blasters were uncivilized because to shoot someone from afar is totally different to engaging them in immediate combat. Star Wars is ultimately about relationship, about facing our fears and our enemies. People talk of Lucas stealing from the Kurosawa, or plagiarizing The Hidden Fortress, but to make that claim totally misses the point of Star Wars. Star Wars is life because life is lived through narrative.
As my studies into Star Wars went further, I kept coming across the work of Joseph Campbell, who wrote that “it has always been on myths that the moral orders of societies have been founded,” including “the myths canonized as religion” (Myths to Live By, p.10). So strong is the power of myth, Campbell notes, that what differentiates human and animal psychology is, according to him, the “subordination in the human sphere of even economics to mythology” (op. cit., p.20). Our lives are shaped around myth. Myth is what helps us make sense of the world around us. When we raise children, we teach them a myth to help them make sense of the world around them. Everyone does it. For some people that is a religious myth, for others not. But we always pass onto the next generation our own myth. Campbell makes an extraordinary point that human children are born too early. In the non-human world, animals are usually born and immediately work to their surroundings, often flying, walking or swimming from the very instant that they are born. Human children are not. We have to slowly learn how to function in the world around us, and it takes us years. As we learn to adapt to the physical environment around us, says Campbell, so too we become structured to accord with our social environment, and thus become a part of an efficiently functioning social order. We do that by absorbing the myths of our social group and by participating in its rites, since rites are the physical enactment of myths (Myths We Live By, page. 45).
Why is our society struggling so profoundly at the moment? Because the myth upon which our society was based, the Biblical myth, has collapsed. Viewed historically, we know without question that this is a work of fiction, only very loosely based on some historical events, but that realization in and of itself is terrifying for those whose lives are based entirely around that myth. So, they retreat into fundamentalism, insisting that anything that disproves their myth is simply wrong, or evil. By necessity, they subconsciously read their myth in a way that protects their position of dominance in society, that allows them to be the Empire without realizing the evil that they are doing. They view the act of rejecting their myth and the myth of their ancestors as an act of rebellion, a disgusting act of defiance against the social order. People will literally kill, or allow others to be killed, in order to protect the myth that gives structure to their world. The claim of orthodox adherents of any religion is that their myth is the only true myth, but it’s not. It’s just a different retelling of the myth that holds every individual society together. Of course the Biblical myth was going to break down as human society became more globalized and more scientific, because it was no longer the way to describe human experience, but a way. The Torah is, at times, savage, just as it is wondrous. Our textual tradition can be brutal and oppressive, as well as transcendent and beautiful. And that’s fine because that was our original telling of the human myth, and it reflected ancient society as much as it reflected that which transcends humanity. Two thousand years ago, a group of people broke away from that myth and wrote their own, a myth with a totally differing focus, which ultimately created an entirely new religion. In order to promote their myth, they had to denigrate, oppress and even kill those who held the previous myth. They had to be the villains in the new myth in order to justify its adoption into society. And this is a pattern that has been repeated throughout human history. Religious intolerance stems from the mistaken belief in the primacy of one myth over another. That has been the greatest failure of religion since recorded human history began. It is not that religion itself is flawed, but the zealous belief that one myth prevails over all others, that one group is chosen to bring enlightenment to an otherwise savage or backwards human race, that in and of itself has probably caused more suffering than anything else in human history. Sometimes that was not even a religious myth, but an economic or social one. In short, the imposition of one myth on a society by force – whether economic or physical - is and will always be a great evil. For the Jewish myth to survive, it has to reject all claims to being the only myth, and we need to embrace it merely as our own myth. That, in fact, is almost certainly why Judaism was never a proselytizing religion – because we have our myth and you have yours and that’s how it should be! That said, that may have been more a response to the changing political position of the Jewish community – when it had military power, our myth clearly tells of wiping out cultures that held to differing myths, particularly those that saw divinity in nature itself. When the Jewish community lost its military might, as we move into actual recorded history, only then it seems that the Jewish community accepted mythical pluralism.
Our myth is unique. There are many myths worldwide that start with the creation of everything around us. Societies use that myth to arrange their moral structure. That myth can be a cosmological fight between Gods, it can be the Big Bang, or it can be the God of the Bible creating the universe. While one of those has actual scientific backing in terms of its historical veracity, nonetheless they are all myths around which society is structured. Torah was our myth, it still is, it’s just that as the Jewish community met with other cultures, it started influencing their myths and also being influenced by their myths, especially with communities where the myths intersected. Torah didn’t steal from the Babylonian Enuma Elish just as George Lucas didn’t steal from The Hidden Fortress. They were retelling a myth for their age, responding to the historical facts of their time. These myths tend to have similar themes, because they are so often based around the hero’s journey. Luke Skywalker, son of Darth Vader, eventually vanquishes his father with the help of the Force. Moses, raised as son of Pharaoh, vanquishes his adopted father with the help of God. But then the struggle continues without Luke, just as it continues without Moses in the rest of Tanach. We don’t read the Bible because it tells us what to do, because it’s the only truth - we read it because it’s an original version of the telling of Star Wars, or of any story of human life. It’s the hero’s journey – the journey to transcend the self regardless of where and when we were born, the journey become the hero, not through technological enhancement, but through the search within. It’s not anti-technology – of course not. The Tabernacle in the Wilderness is a wondrous physical construction, but then so is the Golden Calf. Similarly, the Rebels rely on technological wonders like the Millennium Falcon, or Luke’s robotic replacement hand, but also know of the dangers of the Death Star and Starkiller Base and Darth Vader who is described as “more machine now than man, twisted and evil”. Both Torah and Star Wars guide us to go beyond that which we can make in our own hands and not be seduced by the idolatry of that which we can form with our own hands. They try to remind us to look beyond what we see, to reach out with our feelings. That is our myth.
I now understand why Anakin Skywalker was born of a virgin, precisely because it is common mythical hook around the world upon which to hang the same message, the message of the hero’s journey. As opposed to the virgin birth in Christianity, though, the recent Star Wars canon as expressed in the comics, took that mythical hook and changed it by confirming the fan theory that this virgin birth was brought about by the actual epitome of evil, who wasn’t, as we all thought, Darth Vader but was in fact Palpatine, Vader’s master. Anakin was created by Senator Palpatine just as Vader was created by Emperor Palpatine later. The hero’s journey of birth, transformation and sometimes even glorious death, is a common trope. George Lucas wasn’t stealing from a world religion, he was telling the human story in a different way. He was using the same tropes while challenging them. In his book The Art of Biblical Narrative, Robert Alter describes how Torah deliberately repeats certain themes, such as the wife/sister theme, or the younger usurping the older theme. Having the same themes or hooks but telling differing stories around them is how myth is reinforced and kept exciting for every new generation.
Sitting with my children watching the final Star Wars movie this morning in December 2019, I remembered my father sitting with me watching what we thought then was the final Star Wars movie back in May 1983. Every generation tells the story that defines it in a different way. And we in the Jewish community have to tell our story in a different way. We have to honor the former ways that we transmitted our myth, particularly through the rituals that brought that myth to life for thousands of years. But we also have to tell that story anew. We have to bring midrash, the search for the story behind the story, to the fore. We have to tell that story from new perspectives, such as through feminist interpretation. Sometimes we might tell that story through a scientific lens, like counting Midichlorians, although we have to be very careful of that route because it masks the real story, which is deeply mystical. Sometimes, we have to tell the story through comedy, perhaps even slapstick, as we might on the festival of Purim. Some people will like the new telling, some will not. But we have to tell that myth in a different way for every different generation, while keeping the core of that myth alive.
Kylo Ren was wrong in The Last Jedi when he said, “Let the past die – kill it if you have to.” Don’t kill it, retell it. Find new meaning in it. Take the human myth and, to quote Ben Bag Bag, “turn it and turn it for everything is in it” (Pirke Avot 5:22). See the value in differing religions’ telling of the story, of how they structure their lives, and then see the value of our own unique story and the myth that our community has told for thousands of years in differing ways. And tell it again. Don’t let it die. Reform Judaism has for two hundred years been the attempt to retell our myth once we realized that ours wasn’t the only myth of value. It has been the attempt to tell a myth that says that that a perfect future is possible, that it is possible to overcome evil, but to achieve that we must relieve the burden of the oppressed, lift up those bent low, to protect the widow and the orphan and the stranger. The myth of Chanukah, which starts on Sunday, is a myth of hope, a myth that inspires us to overcome all odds and to bring light in dark times. That is the same myth as Star Wars, it’s the same myth that has been told thousands of differing ways around the world throughout human history. It’s the myth that gets us out of bed in the morning, the myth of a new hope, of connecting to the transcendent in the mundane world around us, of being conduits of the Force, or of God, to bring balance and, ultimately, redemption. It is not my story, or your story, it is our story – the story of generations before and the generations that come after.
We cannot keep telling the story the same way and expect the next generation to accept it. When a child stands before us at bat or bar mitzvah, they’re not saying that they’re ready to take on the yoke of mitzvot, but, rather, that they are ready to take our myth into the next generation, to make it their own. It’s time for a new telling of the myth. It’s time for the old version to end, and for a new version to begin. To do that brings honor to the myth, and especially to the previous ways it was told. We cannot tell the story anew if we do not know how it was told in the past. The joy is in the retelling, in the reshaping of the same myth in recognizable but also in novel ways. That is why we have to study Torah, we have to study our tradition, because otherwise we cannot tell our story anew. We cannot keep the myth going if we don’t know where it’s been. And it is a good myth, a wonderful myth, a myth that looks forward to a better world. May our religious task be to tell that myth anew, to keep the spark of rebellion against tyranny alive in the next generation. May our myth of liberation be the one that guides us into a better future. May our myth of hope help us be “the spark that lights the fire that burns down” (Poe Dameron, The Last Jedi) injustice and cruelty so that we never despair, never give up, until that wonderful day when the wolf will lie down with the lamb, and a little child, the next generation of myth-teller, shall lead them (Is. 11:6). And let us say, Amen.