The Role of Story (Part 1)

This post is an attempt to wrestle with parts of Michael’s comment on my summary of a Jewish Narnia. Please read the comment beforehand to put this post into its proper context. 

Michael makes a number of excellent points in his comment about my attempts to outline a framework for a Jewish Narnia. I’ll start with some in this post. 

Michael correctly points out that a good deal of the appeal of Narnia is the story, qua story, and I fail to address the importance of the story. To this I plead guilty. I do not suggest a recipe for writing a compelling story, only theological atmospheres, themes or setting. 

More fundamentally, Michael asserts that story, per se, is able to both manifest and encompass Christianity in a way that it cannot with respect to Judaism. I think this raises an interesting question, how important are stories and living life as story in Judaism? Certainly Judaism concentrates strongly on law and, Michael notes, law and interpretation tend to unravel or arrest story. Further, I would suggest, when we raise our children we teach them to follow halakha, Jewish law, and attempt to inspire them with story. I (as least) do not formulate my attempts at transmitting Judaism to my children as living the Jewish story. 

In fact, we emphasize the importance of law over that of story. Saul (and others) attempted to circumvent law in favor of what he thought was a higher good (in Saul’s case ignoring the law to destroy the animals of the Amalekites in order to bring sacrifices to God). I can see the argument Saul was making: we Jews, descendants of slaves, have been on a path of moral improvement for centuries. Through that time we have become a people of higher morals, better value judgment, and more sophisticated theological outlook. We know that God does not want the purposeless slaughter of animals. Hence, let us take these animals of the Amalekites and bring them as sacrifices to our most sublime God. That would be living a story. However, Samuel (and God) did not buy it. Samuel rebuked Saul by saying, God is not interested in your value judgments, but that you simply follow His law. 

Yet, perhaps things are not so clear. The mere fact that I quoted a story (about Saul and Samuel) to prove that we do not live a story suggests a tautology. Indeed, the Torah, even the law parts, is a story. No less a personage than Rashi formulated this question: why does the Torah not simply start with the first command given to the Jewish People? Furthermore, even in law we find story (see for example Simon-Shoshan’s “Stories of the Law”) and an actual case (story) in which a decision was rendered, as those found in responsa literature, has more halakhic weight than a theoretical test case. 

 

Still, the law would certainly get in the way of a story and especially a fantasy. In “The Frisco Kid” the protagonist refuses to ride his horse on Shabbat though trying to escape a posse. But that would be nothing compared to four kids from an Orthodox Jewish family getting into Narnia! I can see my son philosophizing over the halakhic status of talking beasts and my daughter trying to determine the proper direction in which to pray towards Jerusalem when Jerusalem is in a different universe. Can you imagine them traveling to Harfang and in the lands of the Lady of the Green Kirtle? They would have to ritually slaughter all the birds they caught. Underground, they would not know when to pray since they cannot see the sun. How would they put on tefillin every morning? And so and so on.  It would make the nightmares on the Dark Island seem tame. 

With that, I appear forced to concede that a Chronicles of Narnia like series would be unlikely to completely reflect the core elements of Judaism. Nonetheless, in my next post I will suggest why I think a Jewish Narnia along the lines I’ve described, should still be written. 

    

But, let me make one more point. Let us assume, as Michael says, the importance of story to Christianity. Is it not strange that Narnia is not known for storytelling? In fact, it is in Calormen where storytelling is an art form taught in schools. Narnia is not the land of storytelling but the land of poetry, and maybe the connection to Judaism there is a little stronger. We'll have to think about it...