Star Wars Day/Acharei Mot - May 4, 2024
Gene G-P
Minyan Atara
This week’s parasha is Acharei Mot. But luckily for you all, my roommate Ezra already covered all the requisite incest, bestiality, and gay sex jokes in his dvar torah last night, so I am free to focus on other material. Which is great, because today is also Star Wars Day - May the Fourth - and that’s what I really want to talk about instead.
In the Star Wars universe, Jedi Knights are masters of the Force, the great balancing energy of the universe that connects all life. When disturbances arise in the Force, the Jedi fight to restore balance - with lightsabers and starfighters, yes, but more importantly with their ability to sense what others cannot and to maintain moral clarity in the face of darkness and uncertainty. It is obvious to me that the Jedis of the Jewish tradition are the prophets. So in honor of Star Wars Day, I want to argue that here, today, in a galaxy far, far away from that of Obi-Wan and Darth Vader, we need to pay more attention to the prophetic voice. To explain why, I am going to draw on three sources: the prophet Amos, whose words we heard in today’s Haftarah (if you weren’t taking shots with Ben at Kiddush Club in the next room), Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book on The Prophets, and a podcast called “The Emerald” produced by Joshua Schrei, which examines modern currents and trends through a mythic lens. Trigger warning: this is going to get a little bit dark and a little bit woo.
The prophet has many roles, but their primary purpose is to shake the people awake. The prophet feels deeply, intensely, personally, the troubles of the world. And the world rarely wants to listen. To quote Heschel:
“The prophet’s word is a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep the prophet feels the blast from heaven…The prophet faces a coalition of callousness and established authority and undertakes to stop a mighty stream with mere words…The purpose of prophecy is to conquer callousness to change the inner man as well as to revolutionize history.”
Today, in 2024, we are forced to be callous. Our screens assault us daily with new horrors: bloody and terrible wars, extreme weather events, threats to liberalism and democracy, the dangers of social media and the end of truth, the resurgence of identity-based hatreds, and a growing understanding that we, as a global society, despite all the gifts and abundance of our modern life, may yet self destruct. To survive in such a time, we numb ourselves. We cling to our daily routines, to our loved ones, to the warmth of our community. That is natural. Our brains were not built to process the amount of information that bombards us from all sides, and so we retreat.
But not all can numb themselves fully. Some people feel more than others the disturbances in the Force, the glitches in the Matrix, the slow, steady growth of dark and dangerous powers. Some are sensitive to the darkness because it is their job to study it: explorers on the frontiers of science, philosophy, or history. For others, the unavoidable truth emerges from within, shaped by their lived experiences as survivors of loss and trauma or members of marginalized groups, who are often the first to bear the consequences when the fundamental structures on which our society rests begin to fail us. Heschel writes: “The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. Gd has thrust a burden upon his soul and he is bowed and stunned at man’s fierce greed.” Likewise, those who feel so deeply the darkness of today’s world have no choice but to scream.
So too in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, the prophet Amos had to leave his day job and risk exile in order to warn the Israelites that a biblical Death Star was headed their way. Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, goes to King Jeroboam and says: “Amos is conspiring against you within the House of Israel. The country cannot endure the things he is saying.” And then with the King’s blessing, he goes to Amos and says: “Seer, off with you to the land of Judah! Earn your living there, and do your prophesying there. But don’t ever prophesy again at Bethel; for it is a king’s sanctuary and a royal palace.” Amos responds: “I am not a prophet, and I am not a prophet’s disciple. I am a cattle breeder and a tender of sycamore figs. But Gd took me away from following the flock and told me ‘Go, prophesy to My people Israel’ and tell them:
וּבָנֶ֤יךָ וּבְנֹתֶ֙יךָ֙ בַּחֶ֣רֶב יִפֹּ֔לוּ וְאַדְמָתְךָ֖ בַּחֶ֣בֶל תְּחֻלָּ֑ק וְאַתָּ֗ה עַל־אֲדָמָ֤ה טְמֵאָה֙ תָּמ֔וּת
Your sons and daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be divided up with a measuring line. And you yourself shall die on impure soil.” (And here we are thinking the rhetoric on college campuses can be a bit over the top sometimes!)
Indeed today, when doom-sayers attempt to rouse us from our slumber with their words, most of us do not have the capacity to truly hear them, having written off prophets, just like shamans, kabbalists, and priestesses, as artifacts of a bygone era. Numbed by our media consumption, blinded by our fear of change, and disconnected from tradition and ritual, we cast aside as madmen those who claim to see and feel things that we cannot, based on ways of knowing we do not understand. This is not to say that all who scream today are prophets. There are many who use prophetic rhetoric to divide and destroy and degrade. These are the Sith lords of our time, manipulating the language of liberation and just revolution to spread infectious ideologies and conspiracy theories. And there are those, like Anakin Skywalker, who intend to fight the darkness, but instead are overpowered by their encounter with it, becoming Storm Troopers themselves, or worse. Yet there are true Jedis among us as well, climate scientists and human rights activists and technology ethicists who invoke the prophetic voice to warn us of real existential risks to our society.
So how do we determine which prophecies are true? Well, we have to check with our inner prophet. Easier said than done, I know. (I warned you this would get a bit woo.) Here’s the thing: I truly believe there is a prophetic voice alive inside each of us. For some of us, we may call it our intuition, for others it might be their connection to Gd or a state of being they access when they meditate or their attunement to the Force. You might notice it when you dream of a place before you ever see it in real life or when you think about your Mom and then the phone instantly rings and it's her or when you stop and check with your gut before you make a major life decision. When you hear something and somehow instantly know that it is True at a level that goes deeper than your rational brain can explain. Whatever you may choose to call it, it is at this level that I sadly feel it is True when I hear that our world is mortally wounded, in desperate need of healing, and the lives of future generations hang in the balance. The Empire is Striking Back.
The good news is there are strategies for fighting the forces of darkness that don’t rely on Ewoks. First, there is our active engagement in the battlefield of ideas. You may not be aware of it, but the truth is that many of you in this room are actually Jedis already, warriors of the Force, dedicating time in your personal and professional lives to spreading the ideas that bring more light into the world, be it through climate activism, teaching the next generation, community organizing, designing new technologies, fine-tuning government bureaucracies, and all the other often thankless tasks that keep the forces of darkness at bay. Quick side note: while I know this community prides itself in not focusing on what people do for work, I actually think there is value in learning how the people we gather with every other week are attempting to shape the world around them. So consider this an open invitation to tell me about your work at kiddush anytime.
And we in this room are already ahead of the game when it comes to another key strategy: building and strengthening our communities. Strong communities provide a refuge from the exhausting work of fighting the darkness, a place of resource and recharge, warmth and connection. It’s where we land after we commute home from the battlefield of ideas on the 4 train. I am grateful to all of us in this room for collectively building this community and ensuring that it remains a safe and welcoming haven.
But what I really want to raise up today, on May the Fourth, is the spiritual dimension of the fight. The prophetic. The woo. Beyond the rational battlefield of ideas, we need to push our society towards the belief that there is meaning in the universe. That our lives and our stories matter. That we matter.
This is what the prophet does. Screaming at us outside the city walls, the prophet insists that our actions have meaning. The prophet demands that we treat the poor with dignity, and care for the earth properly, and be in good relationship with our family, and stop worshiping false idols, even if our friends are doing it on social media. And they show us the consequences should we fail to change.
Amos makes the choice before us clear: “I have noted how many are your crimes, And how countless your sins— You enemies of the righteous, You takers of bribes, You who subvert in the gate the cause of the needy! The prudent keep silent, For it is an evil time.
דִּרְשׁוּ־ט֥וֹב וְאַל־רָ֖ע לְמַ֣עַן תִּֽחְי֑וּ וִֽיהִי־כֵ֞ן יְהֹוָ֧ה אֱלֹהֵֽי־צְבָא֛וֹת אִתְּכֶ֖ם
Seek good and not evil, That you may live, And that the ETERNAL, the Gd of Hosts, May truly be with you.”
It’s the same formulation used by the Jedi: turn from darkness, and the Force, the light, the Gd energy of our universe will be with you.
Not all prophecies are true, but we must keep our hearts (and our brains) open for the big, new, powerful ideas that we need to hear and integrate into our bodies and our societies if we are going to survive as a new political and ecological and technological era rushes up to meet us, ready or not. Or as Heschel puts it: “The point of proclaiming doom is to prevent it.”
May the Force be with us all. Shabbat shalom.
Comments
Post a Comment