Yes: In 5780, You Too Can be a Superhero!

Shattering all records, swooping in to eviscerate its competition, Avengers: Endgame—the final installment of the incredibly popular superhero franchise—set a new record this year in box office sales. At $2.796 billion dollars, the proceeds for this film place it comfortably at the peak of the list of highest grossing movies of all time, topping other cinematic successes such as 1997’s Titanic, 2009’s Avatar, 2013’s Frozen and many, many other well-known and loved films. In fact, seven of the top twenty grossing films of all time are traditional superhero movies, movies which hinge on their main characters possessing some special power—and that doesn’t even include movies from series like Harry Potter or Star Wars, which, were we to include them in our count, would roundly place us with half of the top twenty films of all time revolving around some sort of super power.[1]

To paraphrase a key question from one soon-to-relaunch, bat-themed superhero movie—and if you miss the reference, feel free to come ask me about it after the service—“why so significant?” In other words, what exactly is it about movies whose main protagonists have superpowers that so attracts us, as movie-goers?

Robin Rosenberg—no relation to the batman sidekick—in a 2013 collection of essays, Our Superheroes, Ourselves, gathered works by psychologists analyzing various facets of superhero-related psychological questions. In his own essay in the volume, Rosenberg gives us one answer to this question. He argues that “Superheroes inspire us. They are engaged in a never-ending fight against crime and villainy. They fight the good fight even when they’re tired, burned out, or have crises in their personal lives. When it’s hard to know what the ‘right decision’ is, they generally don’t get flummoxed. They are decisive…. Their exploits and dedication are inspiring. Moreover, they have a clarity of purpose, and a moral compass that is usually enviable, even if we don’t agree with the specifics.”[2]

Indeed, the “super” in superhero is not—at least how such characters are commonly portrayed today—a trivial matter. The average person essentially cannot just become a superhero. It defeats the purpose; it breaks the genre, it undermines the whole concept. However, that doesn’t mean that we cannot aspire to superheroism in our own ways… we, am Yisrael, are no average people. We have an origin story, and—as a consequence of our past fate and fortune, we can harness certain super powers. No, we’re not like Storm from the X-Men—Jews can’t control the weather. If only. But, I’m here to tell you, that in this coming year of 5780, you, as a Jew—you, too, can be super.

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Allow me to speak about one of the most classic of Jewish superpowers… one that I think might almost seem cliché… did you know that we, as Jews, can read minds?

Let me take a step back: 

Every year, on Passover, we recount one of our superpower origin stories. The Mishnah tells us that, when we teach our children about our history during that holiday, we must explain: “My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, subjecting us to harsh labor…” “So what?” you might ask. Well, we read dozens of times in our Torah that we should not oppress the stranger. Why? For we were once strangers in Egypt. In one typical version of this text, from Exodus 23:9, we read: Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.

Ok—true. This version of telepathy isn’t quite the same as what we might see in some superhero flicks. We’re no Gene Gray or Professor Xavier; heck, we’re not even Dianna Troy of Star Trek. But our power is no less significant.

Think of it! A whole people, an entire nation, all of whom are imbued with the special ability to empathize with those in need. To muster, against all odds, the force of compassion for those who look nothing like us! And the “magic words,” the special process necessary for us to tap into this powerful insight into our peers is right there, in the darn book [gesture to Torah scrolls]! How do we activate our empathic powers? By recalling the oppression we have faced and identifying with the other.

Time travel with me, if you will. 19th-century America, specifically New York, 1883. A great hero stands looking out at the problems of the world around her. She works tirelessly, volunteering with the still-existing HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to help waves of poor, Russian immigrants who are arriving to American shores. Like any good superhero, she leads a dual life: By day, she is a poet, an elite among high society. By night, she lives an alter ago working to help the Russian immigrants. Working among the poor Russians, she often mused, “What would my society friends say if they saw me here?” Nevertheless, it was clear to her that work needed to be done; her assessment, in her own language,—“the time has come for actions rather than words.”[3]

Emma Lazarus, this un-caped crusader for the poor, the immigrant, the stranger in her midst, is the woman who gained incredible fame for penning “The New Colossus,” the poem that adorns the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus wasn’t a great poet who happened to be Jewish; she was a Jewish woman who channeled her tradition and values into poetry. When writing: “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!...Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me!” she didn’t write it as someone incidentally concerned with the fate of the disempowered. She wrote it as a Jew. As someone who could dig into the depths of the Jewish ethos, into our collective recollection that but for a few years, for luck, that. would. be. us. As it turns out, as a Jew, Emma Lazarus could do one better than read minds: she could read souls. She could feel the pain of those in need. And she knew what it was that she needed to do. And we can too. If we tap into our history, into our pain—into our origin story of this, our super power of empathy—we can connect with the stranger at a level that is truly profound.

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Our collective access to empathic abilities might be one of our oldest superpowers, as Jews, but it turns out that it’s not the oldest. Going even further back into our history, we find the origin story for another of our powers. Let me ask again: Did you know that we as Jews have the power to turn invisible?

Now, I’m sorry to disappoint—but, to be honest, if you didn’t see a rhetorical twist coming, that’s on you—but our invisibility isn’t like that of Invisible Girl, nor is it Harry Potter-style. We can’t just grab a garment, an invisibility cloak, and make ourselves wholly hidden to the naked eye. Halavai—were that only the case! Still, I’m comfortable with being so bold as to say that what we have might be even better.

Our people doesn’t, on the whole, look any different from the people amongst whom we live. If we are white Ashkenazi Jews, we look like Caucasian people with Eastern European backgrounds; if we are Jews of color, we look like other people of color of similar racial descent. Little, apart from intentional clothing choices we may choose to make [motions to tallit and kippah], physically sets us apart from anyone else who might look like us. We are a people amidst peoples, set apart perhaps by history and heritage, by beliefs—and, god-willing!—by deeds…but not necessarily by anything else. And that can make us invisible.

Jewish invisibility is something of a double-edged sword; our invisibility has meant different things to different Jews throughout history, let alone to non-Jews. I am white, and there is little I can do to hide that. I am equally Jewish, but, on a day-to-day basis, that wouldn’t be evident to anyone who doesn’t know me were I not to wear a kippah. Were I to decide that I no longer wanted to be white, my biology would make such a desire moot, even ridiculous. Were I to decide that I no longer wanted to be Jewish, there would be nothing immediate to stop me. And, for many Jews in the course of history, faced with oppression and overwhelming antisemitism, that has been an attraction and refuge too great to avoid. For others, of course, this is something that would be unthinkable.

Indeed, our invisibility can be a great liability; but, it can also be an asset. One recent documentary, fittingly named The Invisibles, which came out this past January, tells the tale of certain Jews who used their invisibility for the good. This movie focuses on the superpowers put on display by four of the roughly seven-thousand Jews who remained in Germany during the Holocaust, who hid themselves by their own efforts and with the help of others, who intentionally chose to become invisible to the genocidal-German-apparatus killing their fellow Jews. One of the four Jewish heroes featured in the film, Hanni Lévy, dyes her hair blonde and thus manages to safely blend into German society—able to openly walk the streets, no less!—in the heat of the War. Mythic invisibility, were it real, would hide us from society completely; there is something even more powerful in the ability to, as it were, hide in plain sight.

Clearly, our particular brand of Jewish invisibility may at times offer us a passive form of self-defense. But, perhaps more importantly, it can also allow us to actively fight on behalf of others. Jews who can blend into the majority, especially Jews living in the West who present as white, have a duty to use their invisibility, their privilege, for the good. Unlike automatically visible people, who may face immediate prejudices and stigmas, on sight, for being who they are—who may be stereotyped for their looks alone—such Jews’ ability to “blend in” allows them to enter circles of influence and access power often out of reach to those who are visibly part of a minority. With great power comes great responsibility: When so-empowered, we must always fight on behalf of our fellows, Jewish and non-Jewish, whose cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds make them targets for discrimination. We can do this with the superpower of invisibility working to our advantage; not despite our Jewish background, but on behalf of it. If I can borrow from a super-powered work of fiction I alluded to a moment ago, Harry Potter, the real power of invisibility is that, with it, not only can you protect yourself… you can protect others.

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Now, in my opinion, all the best superpowers come from a hero’s experience with actual adversity. In the realm of comic books and movies, this is certainly true, though the pain necessary to attain such powers purely is fiction. However, I think the principle holds for our real Jewish superpowers, too, though the adversity in our case is much too palpable. I think the most potent superpower Judaism enables is a Superman-esque, Hulk-like super-strength—an emotional and existential resilience, an ability to weather the worst of storms, to rebuild, and to come out stronger at the end of the day, that only comes from being a people of survivors.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: When someone Jewish hears bad news or has a bad day, they respond with the tongue-in-cheek retort, “well, worse things have happened to the Jewish people!” Well…but they’re not wrong. The severity and the quantity of the things that have befallen our people are beyond what any group should ever have to endure. Our ancient kingdoms have been conquered, our holy Temples plundered and destroyed, and our people exiled, dispersed into strange lands; our medieval sages tortured, our sacred texts collected and burned, our towns raided, ransacked and decimated; we have withstood crusades, inquisitions, expulsions, and blood libels; genocides, antisemitisms ancient and modern, and polite political discrimination…we have been through it all. And yet here we all are, together again, to celebrate the beginning of another year—what will, undoubtedly be a sweet year!

There is a story, found in the ancient midrashim,[4] that portrays Haman grappling with the difficulty he would have in attempting to get rid of Mordechai and the Jews. In this story, he receives the advice that the gallows—which Megillat Esther suggests Haman had planned to use to kill the Jews—were the only option, since “if [he were to] try to kill them with fire, Hananya, Mishael, and Azariah already escaped the fiery furnace; [were he to] throw them to the lions, Daniel already survived the lions; [were he to] imprison them in the jailhouse, Joseph already was freed from the jailhouse; [and] if [he put them] into the wilderness…[well, they’d] just be fruitful and multiply….” Thus, Haman arrived to his idea of the gallows. Baruch hashem that Mordechai and Esther escaped…but Haman might have had a point—we’re a hardy people!

I think we can learn from the calamity in our people’s past that may well have had the most potential to have ended the Jewish people—the downfall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 CE. It changed everything for us as Jews. When Jerusalem fell, our people lost their ability to have a Jewish safe haven, a place in the world they could fully, permanently, call home and in which they could have self-determination. It would be one-thousand-eight-hundred-and-seventy-eight years, until the Modern State of Israel was founded in 1948, when we Jews would be able to say that again.

And political autonomy wasn’t the only thing we as Jews lost in 70 CE. Up to that point in Jewish history, our whole religion revolved around sacrifices our people made at the holy Temple in Jerusalem. Almost nothing we find recognizable about the Judaism we know today existed then. But when that Jewish Temple was destroyed, Judaism didn’t perish with it. We found new ways of practicing our religion—we developed synagogues, came up with prayers, bundled up our Torah scrolls and brought them to far flung corners of the Earth—and we managed to survive for millenia as a diasporic people. We lost our homeland; we lost our way of practicing our religion; we even lost, until the 19th century, Hebrew, our native tongue; and yet, we never ourselves were lost.

There is a story that, shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple, two great Rabbis of our tradition, Rabbi Joshua and Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, were on their way out of Jerusalem. As they went on their way, they happened to pass near enough to the smoldering ruins of the Temple that Rabbi Joshua could see them. He remarked: “Woe is us that it is destroyed! It was the place that the sins of Israel were atoned for!” Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, the more important of the two Rabbis, said to his fellow: “My son, don’t let it trouble you—we have one other path to atonement like it. Which? G’milut chasadim, acts of loving-kindness.”

This story is all the more empowering when we consider the rest of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai’s history. A great sage who lived in the city of Jerusalem while it was under siege by the Romans, shortly before its downfall, Yochanan ben Zakkai is credited with securing the release of a number of early Rabbis from the besieged city and thus founding the Jewish rabbinic colony in the city of Yavneh. He himself was smuggled out of the city only after feigning death and hiding in a coffin, as a ruse to be let beyond the walls of the siege. In his boldness and his ingenuity, he may well be credited with saving Judaism itself. After Jerusalem and the Temple went down in flames, he wasted no time finding new ways of keeping our tradition vital. When he looked at the smoldering ruins of the Temple and told Rabbi Joshua that everything would be alright, it wasn’t out of blithe indifference. It was out of a sort of strength that feels, to me, almost superhuman. Jews might not be invincible, but we clearly have an incredible super strength, a resilience of spirit that ought to bring us pride.

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Now, most people in the United States, and in the world, are not Jewish. Still, there’s some good data out there about what the broader American public would want were they able to gain a superpower. American adults, for instance, were asked in a Marist poll a few years ago, and their answers showed that, in first place, people wanted the ability to read people’s minds or to time travel. Other top answers provided by American adults included the power of invisibility and the ability to fly.[5] Another poll of Americans—this time of children—asked a similar question: “If you could have one superpower, what would it be?” The top three answers were the powers of teleportation or flight, invisibility, and mental prowess.[6]

Adults and children alike—it would seem—have an attraction to the idea of being super, and some of our top preferences for superhuman abilities apparently transcend age. I will tell you that there is one beautiful place in the poll in which the children topped the adults, in my opinion: some children suggested that—more than things like flight, superstrength, invisibility, or any other classic superpower—they most wanted the ability to make the world better. Were it only so simple!

And maybe it’s not quite that simple; but maybe it’s not as hard as we adults tend to make it either. And, so, as you set out to start your year 5780, I encourage you to dig into your roots and to find things about your own origins that give you power; to think about the ways in which you intend to be super in the year to come, about all the ways you might use your very real superpowers to make our world a little bit more warm and compassionate, a little more just, just a little bit more resilient, and, hopefully too, a bit brighter and a bit sweeter.

Shanah tovah!

[1] https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/11/the-highest-grossing-movies-of-all-time.html?p=2

[2] pp 14-15.

[3] https://jwa.org/womenofvalor/lazarus

[4] Roughly adapted from Yalkut Shimoni, 6:100057

[5] http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/misc/usapolls/US101115/Super%20Powers/Super%20Power%20Preference.htm

[6] https://www.highlights.com/state-of-the-kid/results?page=8