For many years I had an ongoing debate with a childhood friend of mine about who was the better superhero, Superman or Batman. He was a huge Superman fan, but didn’t care too much for the Dark Knight, as Batman was often called. I preferred Batman, but in our arguments my friend always seemed to win. After all, we were young - 9 or 10 years old - and he would remind me of Superman’s super strength, or his x-ray vision, or the fact that he could fly, for crying out loud! And I had to try to defend poor Batman - just a regular old guy who had done a lot of pushups - he did swing around Gotham City on a rope, but it is not quite the same as actually being able to fly anywhere, even into outer space, which Superman did on occasion.
Although I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I’ve thought about it quite a bit since - probably more than a rabbi should think about Superman or Batman, actually - and I’ve realized that one of the reasons I’ve always liked Batman better was that he relied on his brains as much as he did on his brawn. Batman spent time in the lab doing analysis - he was part Sherlock Holmes with his knowledge of all things arcane that might be related in some way to crime. You know Superman didn’t really need much of a plan - he just needed to look through the wall with his x-ray vision, and then fly through the wall with his super strength, and then corral the villain - it didn’t even matter if the bad guys had guns, they bounced right off of Superman.
But Batman had to work things through with his head. He needed a plan - to find the villain in the first place, then to get around the wall, he couldn’t smash through it - then to capture the bad guy. Now I knew I was never going to have xray vision, or super strength, or be able to fly through the air - but I figured I had a pretty decent head on my shoulders, that I could do some decent detective work if I needed to, or come up with a good plan if I needed to, so Batman was my guy - I could relate to Batman! Now that I have the answers I just need to find that kid I used to argue with and go through it with him!
I learned much later in my life that there are some people who believe that the entire super hero genre came originally from the Hebrew Bible. This morning in the Torah portion we read about the laws of the Nazirite, a person in ancient times who would take a vow to not consume any grape products, or to cut his hair - and then in the haftara text that Max read, we heard the narrative of the birth of the most famous Nazirite in history - who would that be? Samson, of Samson and Delilah fame. The story of Samson is one of those stories from the Bible that for whatever reason everyone seems to know. He becomes the great hero of ancient Israel, leading the Israelites into battle against the Philistines, and although he can’t fly and he doesn’t have xray vision like Superman, he does have superhuman strength. And of course how does he lose that strength? Delilah tricks him into cutting his hair.
It is pretty clear that Samson’s story reads like a super hero story. And if Samson was a super hero type figure, I would have to put him into the Superman category, not the Batman category. He isn’t one to pause and work things out in his head - he doesn’t come from the planners, like Batman. Instead, Samson is the charge ahead, use your super strength to carry the day and over power everyone, and then head home. It is what he does in every story about him in the Bible, and it works pretty well for him, until the end, when he has loses his strength after his hair is cut, and he is captured.
But you know you don’t have to go far under the surface to see that Samson was a deeply flawed figure, despite his super strength and heroism. He is an unfaithful husband, consorting with prostitutes and ultimately falling for Delilah, a foreign spy. He has anger control issues, he is self centered and resorts to violence to solve his problems. You might almost say that Samson is a failed experiment in the Bible - he is entirely unique - the other heroes of the Hebrew Bible use strength of spirit or intellect to lead the Jewish people - Samson is the only one, the only one in the entire Bible, who tries to do it by physical strength alone, and despite the super human strength that he has, it doesn’t work. And it is interesting to note that after Samson dies, the next leader of the Jewish people is the prophet Samuel - a person who is a giant spiritually, but who has no physical strength at all.
And that leads me, just for a moment, to the ritual of bar and bat mitzvah. This is the great coming of age ritual in Judaism, and we take it for granted today. But if you think about coming of age rituals in other societies, a bar or bat mitzvah ritual is pretty strange. In the ancient world most coming of age rituals were based on physical strength and survival skills. Young men would be asked to go on their first hunt, bring home their first kill, or survive for a period of time alone in the wilderness. It wasn’t that these things didn’t involve the mind, they did to an extent, but physical strength and ability were far more important than intelligence.
The Jewish ritual flips this on its head. You don’t have to be strong, or tall, or fast, to have a bar mitzvah. But you have to be smart. It is a ritual that is based on your mind, on what you can learn, on what you can understand and read. Imagine that the Jews created a coming of age ritual that is based on reading! What other culture would think of that?! And I suspect that one of the reasons this developed over time was that throughout much of Jewish history Jews didn’t control their own physical destinies. The lands they lived in were often controlled by others. Physically they had no power - so they focused their power in the mind and the spirit, because that is something that another person can’t control. We all know the verse from the prophet Zechariah - לא בחיל ולא בכח כי אם ברוחי אמר ה צבאות Not by might, or by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of Hosts -
And in the ancient world, in many ways, that was a unique idea. And that also was the idea that enabled Jews, when they came to these shores, to build better lives for themselves and their families - it was through education. What did every Jewish family that came from eastern Europe want for their children? That they should do well in school, hopefully go to college, and through the process of growing their minds improve their lives. That story, in one way or another, has played out over and over and over again in the Jewish community - I am sure there are many people sitting in this room right now who have lived it in their own lives.
It is a good lesson for us to hold on to, and I worry sometimes that we have forgotten about it. You know the world wide population today is approaching 7 billion people - I think right now it is reported at 6.92 billion. And how many Jews are there in the world? About 14 million - that is .2 percent of the world wide population. With numbers like that we should know that it won’t be physical strength or power that enables us to make a lasting impact on the world. At the end of the day physical strength, even if you are a Samson, is limited. But the power of the mind is infinite. There is no limit to what can be learned, or understood, or imagined, or explored in the mind. It is that idea, perhaps more than any other, that has defined Jews and Judaism for thousands of years - God willing, it will continue to define us for many years to come.
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