Moses and Magneeto

B'haalotecha/2011
Moses and Magneeto

In the recent movie X Men: First Class, the two main characters, Professor X and Magneeto are friends, but they are soon to be opponents, because they have opposing philosophies of life. Both Professor X and Magneeto are leaders of a group of mutants. These are human beings with extraordinary superpowers. Professor X can read minds. Magneeto can bend steel with his magnetic hands. All the mutants have had to hide their special talents because they mark them as different. And, their difference from other people has been a source of great pain to them. It has led them to be rejected, ridiculed, feared and isolated by other people.

Professor X begins to gather all the mutants together in one community, and living together, they begin to develop a bond with each other, and a sense of normalcy for the first time in their lives. When they are with each other, they are not a minority. But, there is still the outside world to deal with. Non-mutants, most of the world, are threatened by and mistrustful of the mutants. So, they attack them. And, Professor X and Magneeto have opposing ideas on how to deal with that.

Magneeto is Jewish and when he was a young boy he was traumatized by a sadistic Dr. Mengele-type who killed his mother before his own eyes. So when Magneeto grows up, he hunts down his Nazi tormentors and executes justice. He is deeply distrustful of anyone who fears difference. And, he is cynical of the possibility of their changing. He does not believe the world will ever accept mutants. Mutants will always be isolated and hated. The only thing the mutants can do is to band together and to defend themselves or to attack others preemptively before they are attacked.

Professor X has a different idea. He believes that the rest of the world can be persuaded to accept mutants. The other humans are not being deliberately hateful, they are just ignorant and afraid. Professor X wants to create a community of mutants that will use their powers to help the world and to change the world’s attitudes towards mutants. His friend Magneeto says Professor X is naïve.

During one compelling scene towards the end of the film, the ‘normal’ humans fire their weapons at the mutants who have done nothing to harm them. Professor X says “It’s not their fault. They are only following orders.” And, Magneeto says, “I’ve had experience with people who follow orders to do evil. Never again will I allow that to happen to me.”

Does this sound like a Jewish scenario to you? It certainly does to me. So, who is right? Professor X or Magneeto? Magneeto sounds like Theodor Herzl. The world will never accept us, therefore we need our own homeland. Except that even Herzl believed that once we had our own land, we would be accepted by other nations. Magneeto goes further and says we will always be surrounded by enemies, no matter what we do. Therefore the only thing we can do is stick together, be strong, and defend ourselves.

Professor X sounds like Achad Ha’am who believed that the purpose of a Jewish state was to be a light unto the nations, a place that could inspire the others to be more just and compassionate. Magneeto would say: don’t be naïve.

Today’s parasha offers us some insight into this question. The Jewish people come to Moses in the desert, and they say “Mi yaachileinu basar?” Who will feed us meat? We remember the great food we ate in Egypt, and now the menu is so boring that we don’t know if we can take it any more.

Let’s try to imagine for a moment how this scene looks from the perspective of God and Moses. The Jewish people are a free nation for the first time in 200 years. They have seen the Red Sea split in two and walked through it. They have stood at Mount Sinai and heard God speak to them personally and charge them with a noble and idealistic mission: to be world improvers, and starting by being self-improvers.

And, the response of the Jewish people to all of this was: “Mommy, I’m hungry.” Gone is any sense of national purpose. Gone is God’s dream for Abraham’s children: v’shamru derech adonai laasot tzedakah u’ mishpat/to seek the path of God to do what is right and just. All that has disappeared. “If I could just have a really good corned beef sandwich, then I would be fulfilled.”

So, what does God do? God feeds us, but God realizes that’s just a temporary fix. God realizes that what really needs to be addressed is the sense that we are helpless, that we are like small children that need to be taken care of. So, God empowers us. God asks Moses to create more leaders, to extend his own leadership outward to such an extent that Joshua is worried that everyone would think he’s a leader. And, Moses says, if that happened, wouldn’t that be great.

The Jewish people in the desert felt constantly besieged. They felt trapped at the shores of the Red Sea. They ran out of food. They ran out of water. The problems were real. God doesn’t take the problems away. God wants to change the way the Jewish people look at themselves.

Fast forward to today, and it’s easy enough for us as a Jewish people to live under a siege mentality. There is no lack of evidence that we are constantly under siege. Hezbollah to the north, Hamas to the South, Iran developing nuclear weapons. And, who knows what the Arab Spring means?

But, being pressed and feeling pressed are two different things. When the Jewish people were trapped at the shores of the Red Sea, God says to Moses “ma titzak eilai. Don’t act helpless. Daber el b’nei yisrael v’yisa’u. Figure something out. Be a leader.” Or, to put it in more contemporary terms, “What would Indiana Jones do? What would James Bond do?” Objectively speaking, these heroes were constantly under siege. But, they always seemed like they were in control of the events, instead of the other way around.

When it comes to Israel, we can think of Israel as a tiny nation surrounded by enemies who will always hate us. Or, we can think of Israel as the wave of the future. We can think of ourselves as victims. Or we can think of ourselves as leaders.

To be a leader doesn’t mean being naïve. A leader has to be vigilant. But, vigilance doesn’t only mean being sensitive to danger. It also means being on the lookout for opportunities. There is an Israeli documentary called Precious Life which I’ve read about now in several places.

It’s about an Israeli doctor who learns of a Palestinian child who has a life threatening disease. And, he personally raises the $50,000 that is needed to treat this child. The Israeli filmmaker records the interactions between the doctor and the family over a period of several months.

At one point, the filmmaker becomes very upset and wants to stop making the film. Why? Because in the midst of this life-saving treatment for her child, the mother is interviewed and she says nothing would make her prouder than for this very child to grow up and become a shahid/a martyr and blow up Israeli Jews with himself. So, the filmmaker, hearing this, is thinking “Why am I doing this? What is the point of all of this, if nothing is going to change anyway?” A very understandable reaction.

But, a few months later, when the child was fully recovered and ready to go home, something remarkable happened. The mother had a change of heart. She did not want her child to die, she wanted him to live. And, when she went back to Gaza, she told her friends that they did not really understand Israelis. She knew them face to face, and they were not the evil people she and her community had been raised to think they were.

This is a small victory, but it’s a meaningful one. To believe that things can get better and to fight for that doesn’t mean we have to ignore the obstacles. Life can be besieging. In the past few months alone, I have seen people show incredible courage in their personal lives, fighting cancer and other life threatening diseases, looking their own mortality in the eye, and even surviving the loss of a child. In all these cases, the people involved had their moments of deep discouragement. But, they did not bow their heads. And, neither should we.

We can be the pursued. Or we can be the pursuers of a dream. We can be reactive or we can be proactive. And, in that spirit, I’d like to suggest once again that we take up the suggestion of Senator Kirk of Illinois that we as a congregation adopt a prisoner of conscience from Iran. It’s a small gesture, but it’s a meaningful one. It says that we have a vision of what we want the Middle East to look like some day, and we’re not just playing defense, we’re playing offense.

We have a choice. We can get lost in the crisis of the moment. We can play the helpless victim, and say there is nothing we can do. Or, we can place ourselves on the side of the heroes of hope, which is where we were always meant to be.

We are not naïve. We know that the wilderness can sometimes be a harsh and unforgiving place. But, for a people whose eyes are always fixed on the Promised Land, Moses is our model, not Magneeto.