The Movement for Reform Judaism

As many of you know, I think it is right and necessary that we interrogate, even challenge, the sacred texts of our tradition.  In the past...I don't know, five years or so, or maybe it is more by now, another ‘sacred' text, in many volumes and as yet incomplete, has appeared on our horizon, each time in an unprecedented, comet-like blaze of light.  Millions of people passionately await its completion, in which who knows what will finally be revealed.  I've been waiting for a chance to publicly challenge this new ‘sacred' text.  That chance has arrived today.  Today's readings, both cry out for it.  It's an opportunity too good to miss.  It's time for me to take on Harry Potter.  In the interests of my ‘street cred,' I should tell you I have read the first two books, and the fourth one.   

Today we heard ‘Do not turn to ghosts and do not enquire of familiar spirits.' And then ‘If any person turns to ghosts and familiar spirits and goes astray after them, I will set my face against that person...'  As it was pointed out by one of today's b'nei mitzvah, when King Saul went to the witch of Endor and asked her to raise up Samuel's spirit, there was real trouble.  While the Hebrew Bible is full of such injunctions, we don't often hear why turning to ‘ghosts and familiar spirits' is such a bad thing to do, except that God disapproves, an argument I have never found very satisfactory. 

The Harry Potter books, on the other hand, are teeming with ghosts, familiar spirits, and all sorts of other magical thises and thats.  The more the better, apparently.  And it's good stuff; it's fun, it's easy, once you know how, and it gives you lots and lots of advantages.  It may get out of control from time to time, and there are people who use it for evil, but on balance the world of wizardry is vastly superior to the ordinary world. Moreover, the people who are the real losers, the people who are treated with contempt, are the Muggles, those people who have no connection, no ‘in' to the world of wizardry.

So what's the problem?  The Bible doesn't defend its position very well, and anyway, no rational person these days believes in ghosts.  But those may not be the relevant issues.  The Harry Potter books are harmless, fanciful, and good fun, and O, we should be grovelling with gratitude-they make kids READ.  Now, heaven knows I want kids to read, to love to read. I wouldn't mind if adults read some more and all.  But surely it matters what we read? 

I'll get back to the Bible presently, but I'd like to do so by way of another book, or series of books, of roughly the same sort as, though immeasurably better than, the Harry Potter books.  J.P. Rowling is not the first to have written a series of books about a school of wizardry, though she is no doubt the first to be so immoderately enriched by doing so.  Which alone is enough to make me wonder.  Back in 1968, the writer Ursula Le Guin published the first volume of what was eventually to become a quintet of books about a world called Earthsea, one centre of which was a school of wizardry on the island of Roke.  It would be hard to imagine a place more different to Hogwart's, which is after all only a bourgeois English boarding school with tricks laid on.  On the island of Roke, in the Immanent Grove, the pattern of the creation itself is held in place, in balance.  The world of Earthsea, and of the hero, Ged, the Archmage Sparrowhawk, unfolded slowly.  The fifth and final book in the quintet was only published last year or the year before. 

Aside from the obvious-that Le Guin is an imaginative artist of considerable depth and intellectual power, and Rowling is a fanciful hack-the biggest, clearest difference between the two lots of books is that none of the magic in the Harry Potter books has any real consequences in the real world; it all happens in a sort of vacuum or parallel universe.  Wizards or student wizards can wreak havoc all around them, all sorts of magical things can happen, yet not a blade of grass on an English lawn anywhere is the least bit ruffled.  Nothing really changes. 

In the Earthsea books, on the other hand, everything belonging to the world of magic or wizardry--the slightest gesture, the least word, the faintest rune, has real consequences, real effects, in the real world, and in the inner world of the person ‘performing' whatever it is.  Power, of any sort, for good or for ill, is always dangerous and double-edged, and never, ever to be treated lightly, or used lightly.  It creates change, not always for the better, and not always reversible if it is not for the better.

Though the world of Earthsea is full of wizards and dragons and heroes and villains and spells and swords and sorcery, it is grounded in an immense love and respect for the natural and human world, for its order, its power, its weight of care, its potential for joy.  In those things, in those ways, it is very close to the sense of the world that animates those largely unexplained prohibitions against messing with ghosts or spirits that we find in the biblical text. 

In the bible, the natural world is God's creation, as are we.  We are part of the natural world, and at the same time our task is to care for it. We are responsible, and we are bound by natural law.  If we defy death by trying to raise ghosts, or try to manipulate the natural order of things by resorting to ‘familiar spirits,' (our contemporary version of that is probably dodgy presumptuous science), we interfere with, we even may do violence to, the world we are meant to love, respect, and care for.  And for that people suffer, though not us, not yet.

Today's b'nei mitzvah: before are much older you will be living in a world that people of my age, or even people of your parents' age, will scarcely recognize.  I'm writing this at a laptop I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams when I was your age.  I'm still not sure I can exactly imagine it-which is different from using it.  Things are changing faster than we have time to breathe.  It's a cliché by now that the very pace of change is getting faster and faster.   Some of those changes will no doubt be wonderful; others may be rather less wonderful; some may be downright horrible.  I think what I wish you more than anything else is the capacity to discriminate-to know when what is happening around you, or what you may be actually involved with, is being done with love and respect for the world and for the humans who live in it, or whether it (whatever it might be) is so much smoke and mirrors, or worse yet, so much raising ghosts and pursuing familiar spirits. 

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