Benj Fried On Being A Superhero Rosh HaShannah 5779 On the planet Krypton, a scientist named Jor-El discovers a startling finding that has apocalyptic implications. The planet s core has become increasingly unstable, and tremors on the surface are growing in magnitude. If his hypothesis is correct, the instability of the core will lead to the imminent destruction of the planet. The governing bodies of Krypton have been convinced by a rogue mega-computer, Brainiac, that the tremors will subside, so Jor-El suddenly becomes an outlaw. In the waning moments of Krypton, Jor-El, running out of options to launch a planetary evacuation, fashions a make-shift rocket into which he will place his infant son, Kal-El, and send him to a distant planet, Earth. As Jor-El and his wife say good-bye to Kal-El, they send him with a message that they hope that their son will use his powers for good, to help make the world a better place for the people around him. As I reflect on the origin story of perhaps our most famous and beloved hero, Super Man, I can t help but think about its Jewish character. The story of Kal-El, a baby saved from the genocide of his people to grow up in a strange land and become a force of morality and virtue, traces the story of baby Moses from Exodus. We also see a parallel between Kal-El s journey from Krypton and the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, many of whom were the only remnants of entire families and villages annihilated in the Final Solution. Like Kal- El, these survivors would venture forth in a new land across the world, the old country living on only in memory, a metaphor for the destruction of Krypton. The Jewishness of Super Man even reverberates in his very name, Kal-El, a loose translation to the voice of God in Hebrew.
In his book From Krakow to Krypton, Arie Kaplan asserts that the story of the development of super heroes traces the Jewish story in America. Jews created the first comic book, the first graphic novel, the first comic conventions, the first comic book stores. The creators of Superman, Bat Man, X-Men, Spiderman, and the founders of Mad Magazine all Jews. As the founders of the comic book industry, these writers, designers, and artists told the story of the Jewish experience in America the story of the great migration from eastern Europe to the lower east side in the early 20 th century. The stories of society s outsiders, trying to find their way, hold onto the values of the old country, while facing the challenges of xenophobia, nativism, and the pressures to conform and assimilate into American society. They riffed on Jewish myths of the golem and the concept of an uber mensch in creating moral paragons with super human abilities and a desire to bring justice, heroism, and kindness to the world around them. As we reflect on our world, there is clearly something about super heroes that has enthralled us and captivated us. Every year, the major studios release more and more super hero movies. In 2018, 144 super hero movies will hit the movie theaters, grossing 12.6 billion dollars, with 1.4 billion tickets sold. It is clear that our country cannot get enough super heroes. We crave the action on the big screen. We yearn for stories of good verses evil, of super heroes and super villains duking it out, fighting for the heart and soul of our society. These stories thrill us. They inspire us. They leave us feeling good and fulfilled. As we find ourselves at Rosh HaShannah, entering our days of awe and reflection, we think about what it means to live a good life, a meaningful life. If we are so inspired by superheroes on the big screen, if they constitute such a substantial portion of our culture
and our zeitgeist, perhaps we should consider the messages they leave us as we wrestle with these essential questions of life. We should strive to translate heroism into our own lives. To that end, I believe we must ask ourselves the question of what it truly means to be a super hero. Many of us are familiar with the ways that Peter Parker struggles with this very question. Peter was the shy, quiet boy, the nerd in school who never drew much attention, that is, until he was bitten by a radioactive spider. After a night of agonizing pain, Peter found he had super human strength and the ability to climb buildings and shoot spider web from his hands. Peter would use these powers as the hero Spider Man to rid his town of crime and villains. But heroism did not come easy for Peter Parker. He constantly struggled with social awkwardness, an inferiority complex, clumsiness, and anxiety. In many ways he wished that he could reject his identity as Spider Man. After all, his greatest wish of all was to live a quiet life with his beloved MJ, a relationship that he never seemed to bring himself to fully enter with the responsibilities of being Spider Man constantly weighing on him. He would ask himself, Why should I have this burden? It s not fair. Of course, Peter Parker never wallowed in these thoughts for long, because a message that his Uncle Ben taught him always reverberated in his soul. With great power comes great responsibility. When we are blessed with power, with strength, or with capabilities, those blessings are not things that we should use for ourselves or simply abandon. Our gifts are an obligation that we have to sacrifice for others.
It is this message, after all, that Mordecai relates to Esther when she seeks to skirt her duty to her people in their most dire hour, when Haman has passed legislation to annihilate the Jews of Shushan. He tells Esther that it was for this exact reason that she rose to the position of queen, and with that power comes the responsibility to help those in need, even at great personal risk. This message of power and responsibility is one that is so desperately needed in our world. With great power comes the ability to corrupt, manipulate, and extort. But with great power can also come the opportunity to emanate kindness, care, and responsibility. This is a message that was embodied by a young Presbytarian minister by the name of Fred Rodgers. During his spring break from college in 1948, he watched his parents television the first television on his block and thought to himself, What an incredible invention, and how badly is it being misused. Fred Rodgers thought about the ways that television was going to transform the world. Entire generations of children would be raised by it, and the broadcast stations were using this powerful tool to sell sugar and candy with violent and over-stimulating programs. When Fred Rodgers became Mr. Rodgers, he sought to use the power of television to create programming that honored the emotional maturity of children. As he created the neighborhood with a toy trolley and a set of incredibly low production value, he knew he didn t need anything more than authenticity and a message of care to be successful. And that message he would always say to America s children, that I like you just the way you are, was so desperately needed. Adults at the time would condescend to children. When bad things would happen, they would tell them to not worry about it. Fred Rodgers leveled with children, and helped guide them through tough issues in age appropriate ways from
death, to divorce, to the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the Gulf War, and 9/11. Mr. Rodgers knew children had real experiences of fear, and instead of sugar coating or ignoring those problems, he honored children s experiences with love and care. But perhaps the most heroic characteristic of Fred Rodgers was his audacious and authentic kindness. Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood aired in the late 60s at the tail end of the Civil Rights era. Though legislation had passed, prejudices persisted, and many white people did not want to associate with African Americans. They did not even want to swim in the same pools, some going so far as to dump Chlorine and chemicals in pools to prevent interracial mixing. Mr. Rodgers was scandalized by these acts of hatred, and so he had an African-American actor come on the show to play police officer Francois Clemmons. It was a hot day, so Mr. Rodgers and Officer Clemmons took off their shoes and rested their feet together in a wading pool. It was a small act. It was a quiet and subtle act. But it was also an act of audacious kindness. An act that served as a message that this is the kind of world we want to create a world where differences in race, religion, socio-economic status, or gender do not change the kindness we show each other. Fred Rodgers taught us that being a super hero is not about super human strength, but rather it is about super human kindness. It is about seeing ourselves as having power and with that power fulfilling our responsibility to create the world as it should be. Creating a better neighborhood was also the goal of a man by the name of Bruce Wayne. Of course his motivations came from a different place. When Bruce was just a boy, he witnessed the brutal murder of his parents. The experience left him deeply traumatized,
and that darkness would always be a part of Bruce s character. But beyond the trauma, the experience of seeing his parents murdered inspired Bruce Wayne to become a vigilante for justice. He knew the experience of being victimized, and he never wanted that to happen to anyone else. With his vast fortune, he became Bat Man, the Dark Knight of Gotham City. The aspect of Bat Man s story that strikes me is the way that it teaches us that our trauma, our brokenness, is really the thing that forms us into who we are. But the thing about trauma is that it can go one of two ways. We can be victimized by it we can sink into despair and wallow in our grief or even perpetuate the cycle of abuse ourselves. Or we can use our pain to make us into super heroes people who understand what it means to be hurt and use that empathy to try to alleviate the suffering of others. The Torah teaches us this lesson. Thirty-six times we are told to remember the experience of slavery in Egypt so that our pain and our brokenness will be used to make our society a better place. Love the stranger in your midst, treat him as your brother, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. We are commanded to use our experience of trauma to make us into the people we are meant to be. This is certainly a lesson that a young lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsberg took to heart. She graduated Columbia Law School top of her class in 1959, but despite top recommendations from everyone she knew, she was rejected time and time again from jobs because of her gender. The legal world was not one that wanted to accept women in its midst in 1959, and it was this initial rejection that ultimately formed Ruth Bader Ginsberg into the nation s leading advocate for women. When the women s movement began in the 1970s, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg founded the Women s Rights Project at the ACLU, the nation was in desperate need of a super hero.
Laws pertaining to gender that were on the books in the 70s would shock us today. A woman was legally required to have her husband s permission to have a credit card. A woman could be fired from her job for being pregnant with no legal recourse. According to the law, sexual harassment in the work place did not exist. Perhaps most horrifying, no matter how abusive or violent her husband is, a woman could not accuse her husband of rape. While people like Gloria Steinem were marching in the streets, Ruth Bader Ginsberg was fighting on behalf of women and men for gender equality in her characteristically understated yet effective way. She gained national prominence for her work on Frontiero v. Richardson, the case of Sharron Frontiero, a lieutenant in the United States Air Force who was denied a military housing stipend because she was a woman. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and Ginsberg, arguing from an ACLU amicus brief in front of the court, absolutely captivated the Justices with her passion, her dedication, and her genius. Despite the fact that the court consisted entirely of men, she managed to convince them of the ubiquitous and disturbing nature of sex discrimination and won the opinion of the court for her client 8-1. Ginsberg s entire body of work has been about the pursuit of justice. In 1971, in a brief she wrote for Reed v. Reed, she succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to extend the equal protection clause of the 14 th Amendment to women for the first time. She argued and won social security spousal survival benefits for men, proving that the women s movement for equality was truly for the benefit of everyone in our country. And when she was on the High Court herself, she wrote the opinion in United States v. Virginia, which forced an all male military college in the state of Virginia to accept women into its freshmen class. Some
of the critics of this opinion bemoaned the loss of tradition in this academy, but Justice Ginsberg responded to them: Just wait 20 years, and you will be proud of the women that come from this academy. She was right. Now the women s movement is far from achieving all its goals, but because of super heroes like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the legal realities for women and the culture of our country have improved substantially. Justice Ginsberg teaches us that the pain and brokenness we experience must not discourage us or stop us from fulfilling our destiny. To be super hero is to transform our brokenness into the fire in our belly to make the world that is into the world that should be. Now I know you all are waiting for me to talk about Wonder Woman. But two decades before Wonder Woman smashed box office records on the big screen, there was Xena the Warrior Princess. Xena, a warrior with formidable fighting skills, is on a quest for redemption in ancient Greece. She fights against warlords that terrorize the countryside to bring peace to the villagers she finds on her travels. The backdrop for Xena s quest is a dark past in which she was a warlord of a powerful army. She committed acts of terrorism, piracy, and murder. Eventually Xena becomes horrified with the darkness her actions have unleashed, and she decides to give up her life as a warlord, and commits herself to act for the greater good. The story of Xena is a complicated one. She is not a moral paragon. Far from it she is an anti-hero, a mass murderer. But she is someone who proves that we all have the capacity to commit ourselves to change and growth and love. She has done horrible things, but in the end she resolves to undo some of the harm she has done, or at least help those
she has hurt to find peace. And in so doing, she truly transforms herself and the world around her. Xena is a message in the power of teshuvah, of repentance. She teaches that we are the authors of our stories, and so we have to take on that responsibility, no matter how far we go astray, to set our lives on the paths of justice and love. When I think of people who have held onto their capacity to change and evolve in spite of all the odds, I think of Rabbi Mark Borovitz. Mark was a troubled child who began stealing before the end of middle school. Petty theft turned into grand scale check fraud operations and scams that conned people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was a thug, a drunk, a mobster, and his actions landed him in jail. But that s not where the story ends. You see, Mark s is not a story of a kid gone wrong. It s a story of redemption. When he got out of prison, he began working with troubled people and eventually founded Beit Teshuvah, a rehabilitation facility for people in recovery. It is through his loving education and his frank and tough mentoring that he and his wife Harriet have saved hundreds of souls from the certain death of serious addiction. Rabbi Mark has seen the darkest sides of humanity, but he still holds onto hope. The most important thing he teaches the residents at Beit Teshuvah is that the most dangerous lie that people can tell themselves is I can t change. That is a lie that leads people to spiritual death, because it closes opportunities to engage in the life affirming evolution of our character. But when we see ourselves as having the ability to change, we can truly become super heroes who, like Xena, can change the world. So what does it mean to be a super hero? I think that it is actually quite a bit simpler than it might seem. Being a super hero is not about super human strength, or speed, or
owning a multi-million dollar utility belt. Being a super hero is about cultivating our character. It is about seeing ourselves as having power and using that power to fulfill our responsibility to the world. It is about using the pain and brokenness we experience in our lives to inspire us and form us into people who change the world. And it is about transcending the sins of our past and committing ourselves to the process of perfecting our character. This is the way that we can become super heroes. This is the way that we can take the values of all those super hero movies we see on the big screen and bring them into the real world. Because if we look at the world around us, we are in desperate need of super heroes. We are in the midst of an environmental catastrophe that is bringing our planet to the existential brink. The policies of our government have created a humanitarian crisis at our border, and over 500 children are still not reunited with their parents. Our government is gas lighting us with lies and alternative facts, and the administration is acting in dictatorial ways by trying to discredit reputable institutions like the free press. With all the darkness in the world, it can be tempting to numb ourselves to it and escape into the fantasies of our choosing. But that is precisely why we have to be super heroes. Because ultimately, our government is elected by us and our culture is a reflection of who we are. To say that we are disempowered from changing the world is to abdicate our moral responsibility. As Rabbi Tarfun said: The day is short and the need is great. It is not incumbent on you to finish the work, but neither are you permitted to refrain from it. If we commit to it in small ways or in great, I know that all of us can be super heroes. With great power comes great responsibility, but when we take on that responsibility, we can change the world.