In “After Auschwitz,” Richard Rubenstein writes: “Sacrifice is the
drama of man’s hatred of God and his ultimate submission to him … Men achieve
catharsis by symbolically acting out that hatred through ritual violence
against the sacrificial victim, without being consciously aware of what they’re
doing … In sacrifice, we overcome God, and, at the very same moment, we submit
and recognize His inevitable victory….With dramatic force … the terrible lesson
is born in on the community that it has only the choice of controlled,
regulated violence or irrational and uncontrolled violence.” He says sacrifices allow us to channel our
natural drives toward violence, hatred and subsequent guilt into an organized,
contained ritual.
The short story “The Lottery” places these
urges in a more modern context, as a community brings random, ritualized death
on an innocent in order to placate the gods and channel their own destructive
inclinations.
Several years back, I wrote
about channeling violent urges toward children in an article describing the
circumcision of my son: No parent should be denied this experience, even
vicariously, of inflicting upon his child a ritualized blow so intense as to
make him both shake and recoil, yet so controlled that no damage is really
done, to signify that this will be the worst the child will ever know from his
parent's hand. For it is from the father's hand that Abraham's knife dangles,
every moment of every day.
So there is something innate in us that seems to crave
violence, a drive piqued especially by brutality toward children. That’s why the Torah, before teaching almost
any other lessons, makes it clear that God does not desire child sacrifice. Abraham learns that lesson when he binds Isaac
to the altar and the Torah explicitly distances itself from Molech
worship, which involved the killing of children.
In “The Hunger Games,” God takes the form of a
totalitarian government ruling what was once called North America – there is no
religion, per se – and the leaders of Panem are sadistic in their normalcy.
(See a plot summary here)
The level of their evil is so banal, so commonplace, as to barely be noticed. The people’s spirits have been beaten to a
pulp after 73 years of ritualized child murder, or so we are led to believe.
This is what the Third Reich would have looked like had it lasted another half
century. Its leaders no longer strike
fear – the President is played by Donald Sutherland, not Ralph Fiennes; the
fashions are more bizarre than scary. No
one screams in horror at the prospect of children being thrust into a
nationally televised killing field. No
one flinches when the kids are tortured with fire, starvation and genetically
altered creatures that would have made Mengele proud. Only the snarls of the killer dogs sound
remotely Nazi.
Into this world gone mad lands Katniss, the heroine,
whose moral compass was set far from evil’s ground zero, the Capitol. Put in the most extreme situations, Katniss
makes all the right moral choices and never let's that madness change her. She is forced to kill but never murders. She risks her life to save others, rising
above the “Lord of the Flies” jungle into which she has been thrust. In a world
where Jews seem to have become extinct, she is a worthy heir to Judaism's most
lofty values. If there are Jews in Panem,
we don’t them crying out against the evil.
Therefore, there are no Jews.
The theater last night was packed mostly with young
adults and teens, primarily girls. No surprise, although the books have had
much more crossover demographic appeal than the “Twilight” series. What I liked was how the film’s positive
moral message was reflected in the behavior of the crowd. Some wore Katniss pony tails or t-shirts
representing the various districts ruled by the Capitol – but there was none of
the weirdness of costumes worn at other cult mega-hits. There was some cheering and hooting at the beginning
and the expected oos and aahs at Katniss’s first kiss. But for most of the film, there was
silence. The viewers were rapt – dare I
say, reverential, as they watched kids killing kids. When Cato, the most vicious of Katniss’s
opponents, met his bloody demise, there were no cheers of the sort you might
hear when the Wicked Witch melts or Voldemort is finally overcome. There is something deeper going on here than
a simple victory of good over evil, and the young people present were tapping
into that. I’ve been to jingoistic
political events where adults were far less attuned to the banality of
bloodlust. It made me wonder just how
much this group saw Katniss as fighting their fight and bleeding their
wounds. Whatever the reason, this room
filled with several hundred young people was as quiet as a cathedral at the
end.
There was little reason to cheer. Katniss is not so much a victor as a
survivor. The evil apparatus remains in
place. The gods of the government will
demand the blood of more children next year, as expiation for the sin of
rebellion. The ritualized deaths of the
innocent will once again be the price for staying alive. The controlled, abuse of the young will keep
chaos at bay. The kids seemed to intuit
that, to an extent, what they saw on those killing fields of the Capitol goes
on around them every day. Not just in Toulouse
or Uganda, but everywhere, everywhere where children become invisible and human
life becomes expendable.
In the end, “The Hunger Games” celebrates the
indestructibility of the human spirit and the unquenchable thirst for
freedom. Just in time for Passover.
(See a nice article from
Tablet Magazine exploring Jewish connections to the series, and another
tying it to Holocaust themes.)
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