Joe Schwartz: Wanted: A Jewish Tolkien

Why We Need a New Mythology

David H.—Fantasy literature has played a crucial role in the development of Western civilization. Through the great sagas, young people internalize underlying values while turbocharging their imaginations about the narratives that can drive the real world through history. In this pathbreaking essay, Joe Schwartz critiques the absence of such sagas in the Jewish world. In a period of renewed Jewish sovereignty and the world-changing, civilization-building potential inherent in our new phase of history, the need for Jewish fantasy literature is acute, a crucial building block of our people for generations to come.

Joe Schwartz is an attorney, rabbi, and Jewish entrepreneur. He serves as Director of Educational Innovation and Director of Makom at the Jewish Agency for Israel. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, Avigail, and their children, Zev, Paz, and Shai. Check out his Substack here.

The following is an exclusive reprint from the anthology Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, edited by David Hazony. Copyright © 2023 Wicked Son. Reprinted with permission.

Wanted: A Jewish Tolkien

Why We Need a New Mythology

Joe Schwartz

“Are you the tour guide?” a kindly woman asked my nine-year-old yesterday, as we wandered through the Acropolis. Zev smiled at her with impatience and went back to explaining to his long-suffering younger sister about Poseidon and Athena, and how they vied to be the patron god of Athens.

We flew from Tel Aviv to Athens for the weekend because ever since Zev discovered Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series this summer, his thirst for Greek myth cannot be slaked. He tore first through the five-book series and moved on to the follow-up, The Heroes of Olympus series; he listened and re-listened to every episode of the Greeking Out podcast (to which he falls asleep at night); read and re-read D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths; delivered a presentation on the Greek pantheon to his fourth-grade class; constructs Lego models of Charon ferrying souls across the Styx; and never desists from quizzing me on the curse of the House of Atreus, the parentage of Herakles, the career of Daedalus, and on and on. Since landing in Athens, he has dived into learning Modern Greek on Duolingo.

Before Riordan’s young-adult adventure stirred his passion for Greek myths, Zev spent two years at Hogwarts, memorizing the catalogs of fantastic beasts and explaining to anyone who would listen the difference between hexes and curses. 

I write this not to kvell in public about my son (well, not only to kvell), but to point to a great hole: Seeing how these stories of adventure and danger kindle my son’s imagination, I have been trying to nudge him toward things Jewish. He is, after all, living in the Jewish state, in the ancestral home of the Jewish people, spending his days and nights in Hebrew, among Jews of every color and variety.

And yet the bookshelf of works of Jewish imagination that might win his interest is bare. 

I don’t mean to say there exist no works of imagination featuring Jewish protagonists—there are many, including some that are excellent (special mention here goes to Adam Gidwitz’s 2018 The Inquisitor’s Tale). Only a few books drawn on Jewish folklore have been written for children. And, of course, there exist compilations of Aggada (Jewish legend), including some edited for younger readers. What has not been produced, however, is anything approaching the work of J.K. Rowling or even her imitators—to say nothing of J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, universes as elaborate as Middle Earth, built out of and inspired by the Jewish past and the Jewish present and the vast trove of the Jewish imaginary, as deeply informed by our histories, stories, legends as Harry Potter’s world is by Britain’s, or C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series is by Christian myth; no stories full of wonder and adventure, involving protagonists who confront great danger and overcome their own terror and limitations to achieve what they believed impossible, paying a terrible price in the process. These are the elements, after all, that grip our imagination on the deepest level, moving not only Zev but his middle-aged father. 

Above all, I search in vain for a work of the Jewish imagination that would open the door to the great saga of the Jewish people. We live forty-five minutes from Jerusalem, but nothing my son has read or watched draws him there. Instead, here I am, seated in a café in Kolonaki.

***

This is not a minor lacuna. The Jewish people, like any people, is not a natural but a social fact. A people is what the scholar of nationalism Benedict Anderson has called an “imagined community.” Though most members of a people, writes Anderson, “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” It is through this imagined communion that a people summons itself into existence. To the extent a people can be said to exist at all, its existence transpires upon a landscape of its imagining, by and through the sagas of its heroes and their trials. By telling, retelling, and revising its shared mythic past, a people points the way toward a shared mythic future. And in the absence of this imagined communion, no people—including the Jewish people—possesses any existence at all. Indeed, much of what preoccupies and alarms the organized Jewish world—declining affiliation, declining literacy, declining attachment—is downstream from this impoverishment of the Jewish imagination.

And imaginations are forged early. The rabbis well understood this, which is why they placed so great an emphasis on winning the imaginations of children. The Passover Seder, perhaps the central ritual of rabbinic Judaism, takes shape in response to a threat foreseen by the Torah: If it was the shared experience of the Exodus from Egypt that forged the Jewish people, what will become of future generations who did not experience the Exodus first-hand? What will bind them to one another and to generations gone by? The Torah’s answer is: The recounting of our great national saga. “And when, in time to come, your child asks you, ‘What is this?’ you shall reply to him: ‘With a mighty hand the Eternal brought us out of Egypt, the house of bondage’” (Exodus 13:14). Even if the child is so estranged from the community that she cannot formulate the question, the Torah commands us to recount the story to her unprompted: “And you shall tell your child on that day, ‘It is because of what the Eternal did for me when I went free from Egypt’” (Exodus 13:8). From the word used for “tell”—vehiggadeta—we get the Haggadah—“the telling”—which lies at the heart of the Passover Seder.

But merely telling the tale is not enough. Instead, the rabbis adjure us to succeed in enthralling the imaginations of those to whom it is told. “In every generation,” in the words of the Haggadah, “a person must imagine himself as though he is leaving Egypt.” That is, the Jewish community is charged with bringing the saga of the Jewish people to life for them and for the next generation, making the Jewish story into the story their imagination inhabits.

This is a very high bar, which in our day has only gotten harder to reach. 

When Jews lived in tight-knit Jewish communities, their curriculum was exclusively Jewish sacred text and their lives were structured by Jewish ritual. As a matter of course, then, Jews’ imaginations belonged to the community. As the great historian of Jewish thought Eliezer Schweid wrote, “The religious myth that had formed the collective historic memory of the Jewish people throughout the generations [was] nurtured by the Bible, the legends of the sages, the prayer book, the poetic hymns and kabbalistic literature of the Middle Ages.” And yet, already by the close of the nineteenth century, this great mythic collective consciousness had been progressively undermined by modernity. Into that vacuum stepped poets and writers like Hayim Nahman Bialik, Micha Josef Berdichevsky and others, who sought to reshape the religious inheritance into a “historic myth of the Jewish people on its path through destructions and exiles toward redemption in its own land.” The attempt was only partially successful in its day. Today, these historic national myths have lost much of their hold on the popular imagination, even here in the Jewish state.

In our time, for all but the most traditional, collective identity has become a voluntary affair, and competition for the minds and attention of young Jews is fierce. Imaginative universes abound, and with them ever more imagined communities. More and more Jews belong primarily to these, straying further and further from the historic myth of the Jewish people. But without stories of our own to fascinate young Jews, their fertile imaginations will yield only foreign crops.

We do not want for source material. In 2010, Michael Weingrad observed in the Jewish Review of Books that biblical and rabbinic literature, Jewish folklore, and the wondrous world of the Kabbalistic tradition contain “all the elements necessary for classic fantasy—magic, myth, dualism, demonic forces, strange worlds.” If anything, Weingrad understated the sheer volume of material ready to be transfigured into fantasy. Is any story as deeply affecting as that of our people, banished from its home, scattered across the globe, preserving its ancient traditions and languages under conditions of almost unendurable hardship, yearning day and night for return to its land? The long history of the Jewish dispersion—to Spain, Russia, Turkey, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Uzbekistan, India—contains endless episodes and incidents ripe for exploration. Jews have been mystics and warriors, poets and scholars, revolutionaries and saints.

It is more than surprising, then, that according to Weingrad—who has spent the better part of the past two decades keeping abreast of Jewish imaginative fiction in the Jewish Review of Books and on his blog, “Investigations and Fantasies”—no book or series has yet been written that manages to “plumb the theological depths like Lewis” or even “thrill Jewish preteens with tales of Potterish derring-do.” To be a Jew is to be heir to a story more remarkable and more filled with incident than that of any other people. Indeed, echoes of our story run through the work of Tolkien, who took inspiration from it. Why then do we have over a dozen anodyne children’s books about potato pancakes and none about the mystic Abraham Abulafia, who set out alone on the quixotic quest to convert the Pope to Judaism?

The material is there for the taking. Why have such works of imagination not already been written?

***

The first, most obvious reason has to do with literacy: The overwhelming majority of Jews living outside of Israel cannot read Hebrew, Aramaic, or any other classical Jewish language; and few Jewish artists in Israel (alas) take a deep interest in Jewish lore and myth. Just as Tolkien could not have created Middle Earth without being steeped in Old English, Germanic, Celtic, and Norse literature, so our own Jewish fantasists will need to discover their inspiration in Hebrew midrash, in Aramaic mystical literature, and in older Near Eastern myth.

A second reason, as Yehezkel Kaufmann and other scholars have noted, is that Israelite religion was distinguished from other Near Eastern religions by its tendency to strip its stories of mythological elements. The Pentateuch contains no pantheon, no demigods, few monsters, and almost no magic. One can detect traces of earlier myth in our corpus, but these have been muted and rationalized. God performs miracles; human beings, including even those with second sight, remain firmly human. It is for this reason that Weingrad is skeptical about the possibility of Jewish fantasy literature. There is something in the Jewish imaginary, he argues, that resists fantasy: “Whereas fantasy grows naturally out of Christian soil, Judaism’s more adamant separation from myth and magic render classic elements of the fantasy genre undeveloped or suspect in the Jewish imaginative tradition.”

A related challenge is Judaism’s historicizing element. While Jews retell and relive great events from our mythic past, we have always been aware that our story is ongoing and looked expectantly toward messianic redemption. Judaism is a historical faith. Rather than departing for a parallel realm, the Jewish imagination has tended to occupy itself with this world and with our fate as it unfolds in history.

To create a Jewish fantasy universe, then, will demand that our artists work against the grain of normative Jewish religion and culture, and push against mainstays of the fantasy genre. Jewish fantasy will need to differ in its very essence from non-Jewish fantasy. Not for us the stories of knights, dragons and wizards, or simple tales of good triumphing over evil. Something else will be needed to light our children’s imaginations. Those who choose to cultivate the fields of the Jewish imaginary will have to work harder to sow the ground and make it bear fruit. We cannot know what this will be like until it is done, of course. But it has been done before: Those mythic elements of Jewish religion that were suppressed in the Bible spring up in rabbinic legend and explode into a riot of exotic imagery in medieval Kabbalistic literature.

The chief obstacle to the creation of such works is the damage that has been done to

the Jewish imagination by our own historical experience: first by exile, and then by political Zionism.

Jews living in the West for over a millennium as a coldly tolerated and often despised minority were cast in certain roles and not others. And in being so cast, we learned to imagine ourselves only in profoundly limited ways.

The Jew appears in pre-modern English literature, according to the critic Leslie Fiedler, only as “the Usurer, the Jew with the Knife, the Jew as Beast”: “half-comic, half-hideous, with red wig and grotesque false nose, who meets us, bloody knife in hand, to call us chaver, fellow-Jew: Shylock, Fagin, Isaac, Barrabas, Ahasuerus, Cartaphilus, Colleoni—his momentary labels do not matter.” In the modern period, the Jew with the Knife gave way to more benign figures. From Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779) until today, the Jew appears as a paragon of liberal virtue: broadminded, benevolent, harmless, and sexless—think Judd Hirsch in Independence Day. And what of Jewish women? Though in the 1970s Barbra Streisand and Erica Jong had their moments (which coincided with Dustin Hoffman’s and Elliott Gould’s turns as sex symbols), in general to identify a woman as a Jew is still to mark her out as loud, shrewish, and undesirable.

And yet in its revolt against these and similar constructions of Jewishness, political Zionism too often stripped its protagonists of any meaningfully Jewish traits: Jewish and “exilic” were, for it, one and the same, and so Jews would have to become stolid Hebrew warriors and farmers without a history, speaking a Hebrew uninflected by the 2,000 years that transpired since the fall of Betar. The ideal type of the Second-Aliya pioneer is all but indistinguishable from any other proletariat, except that the field he plows is in the Land of Israel.

To mine the Jewish past for distinctly Jewish stories, in which heroes display distinctly Jewish virtues, would require the artist to shake off both her “exilic” and her narrowly Zionist conditioning. It would demand that we reenter our own history with an ear toward its uniquely Jewish music. Early cultural Zionists began this work. It falls to us to continue it.

***

How might this be accomplished?

The project I envision draws inspiration from Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, and Riordan, but is different in important ways. Tolkien’s Middle Earth was not just a flight of fancy, but something more serious. He aimed at least in part to imagine what a British saga on the order of the Finnish Kalevala or the Norse Edda would be like; and by the time he completed The Lord of the Rings, he had created an allegory for a Britain transformed by industrialization, war, modernity, and much more. Lewis, for his part, embedded Christian themes in his tales of Narnia. And Riordan, of course, uses his tales as an opportunity to teach his young readers about Greek and Roman myth. The project or projects I am calling for can resemble these or be something entirely new. What is important is that they arouse fascination with things Jewish and prompt further exploration.

What themes might our Jewish Tolkiens, Lewises, Rowlings, and Riordans draw on? It seems to me that they should seek to tap those veins of the Jewish imagination that have been the most vital and enthralling over the millennia.

The messianic idea and messianic hope, as Gershom Scholem famously argued, has animated and propelled Jewish history. Jews throughout history have awaited their redemption in the midst of exile, holding fast to promises of restoration at our lowest ebb—or else despaired of divine aid and sought to force the end through mystical and political activism. The idea has led in many different directions—here toward secret rituals aimed at repairing the divine fabric of the universe, there impelling Jews to revolt against their fate through political activism, and still elsewhere channeled both into exalted ethical ideals and antinomian orgies. This great electric conduit of Jewish history and all that it has yielded are a powerful current to be tapped.

Another central and idiosyncratic feature of Jewish history has been our tendency toward discord, dissension, and debate. The Jewish people has always been at war with itself because we contain diametrically opposed tendencies: mysticism against rationalism, radicalism against conservatism, utopianism against realism, particularism against universalism. The way Jewish controversies give expression to deep and eternal tensions is rich ground for narrative as well.

Finally, the vast scope and sweep of Jewish history and literature offer a tremendous opportunity. Jewish writers must look beyond small and well-worn incidents and settings: beyond Anatevka, beyond America, beyond even the Holocaust. The stage of the Jewish saga has not been a single land, like Narnia or Middle Earth, but the entire world: Egypt, Babylonia, Rome, Persia, Spain—we were there, of and apart from the greatest imperial powers. Jews lived in Baghdad and Yemen for more than 2,000 years. There is so much that remains untapped. Jewish history and literature remain in many ways a vast and undiscovered continent. Melila Hellner-Eshed of the Hebrew University has only recently made available in Hebrew and English an entire metaphysics—the theology of the partzufim found in the Idras of the Zohar—utterly unlike anything we know in Jewish mysticism. A Jewish writer of imaginative literature must be an explorer.

Above all, the importance of the endeavor must be recognized. Our writers and artists and dreamers are our most precious resource. Supporting their work, helping them build worlds to enthrall the Jewish imagination, should be among our highest priorities. We need a Jewish Creative Trust overseen by our leading scholars, artists, and visionaries. Big, expensive, and ambitious products should not be the enemy of smaller and more targeted efforts. There is no earthly reason why a Jewish equivalent to the Greeking Out podcast has not been produced, nor a beautiful and strange illustrated retelling of Torah that approaches the D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths and Norse Myths. Bringing these smaller efforts to market could spark larger visions.

As much as I kvell over my children, they are not unique. There are today millions of bright, curious Jewish children whose attentions and energies could be turned to things Jewish. My son, after all, is eagerly teaching himself Greek, on his own initiative, on account of a book and the spell it cast. Imagine what is possible, what talent might be enlisted to Jewish causes, what energies could be harnessed for a rebirth of Jewish culture and civilization. This Jewish future must be dreamed into being—and it begins with the dreams of children.